


On the Market

by Mel_Liffragh



Category: AUSTEN Jane - Works, Pride and Prejudice & Related Fandoms, Pride and Prejudice (1995), Pride and Prejudice (2005), Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
Genre: City of London - Freeform, F/M, Slow Burn, Y2K!AU, traders - Freeform, warning: swearing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-20
Updated: 2021-02-19
Packaged: 2021-03-09 18:27:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 29
Words: 132,825
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27530755
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mel_Liffragh/pseuds/Mel_Liffragh
Summary: When Elisabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy's eyes meet across a trading desk in the City, naturally it's Pride and Prejudice at first sight.A quirky modern AU homage to Jane Austen's best loved love story, set in the fast changing City of London at the turn of the Millennium.Cross posted on FanFiction.net.On The Marketis copyright 2021 Mel Liffragh, all rights reserved.
Relationships: Elizabeth Bennet/Fitzwilliam Darcy, Lizzie Bennet/William Darcy
Comments: 46
Kudos: 62





	1. Ill met by the lifts

  
It’s a truth universally acknowledged, that a single woman with a printer and a subscription to the _American Journal of Quantitative Financial Studies_ will never be in want of an invisibility cloak. With this in mind, and though still not sure she should call herself single, Elisabeth Bennet grabbed a printout of “The effect of the measurement window on the heteroskedasticity of intra-day return metrics with non-synchronous trading: a bootstrapping experiment”, and headed two floors up to the canteen.  
Elisabeth did not normally feel the need to hide behind long equations in order to grab a morning coffee. She considered life too short to be wasted on looks in general, and heels, makeup and hair straighteners in particular. Perhaps it was easy for her to care nothing for appearances when she’d never had to contend with being plain, but she did in fairness contend daily with sticking out like a sore thumb, being the only woman on the bank’s trading desk, one of less than a dozen on the third floor and, of those, the only one with a half decent job. 

  
Contend she did, rarely without protest, but usually without recourse to the _American Journal of Quantitative Financial Studies_ either. Today, however, was not a normal day. Though the markets were yet to open the atmosphere on the trading desk had already reached levels of toxicity hardly compatible with human survival. Andy, whose cock-up the whole thing was, continued screaming obscenities at his broker long after the broker had hung up:  
“I don’t fuckin’ wanna ‘ear it you tosser! You fuckin’ sort it out, we’re not fuckin wearin’ it, you ‘ear me?”  
He wasn’t talking about make up or heels either: what Andy didn’t want to “wear” was the 20-odd million loss he’d made on a trade in the previous night’s closing auction. Even for a bank this size, this was a massive balls up and, for all that he screamed and swore and shouted at his broker, Andy knew it was not the broker’s fault. He bashed his handset against his desk a couple of times, then called again:   
“Don’t you fuckin’ang up on me, you cunt!”

  
Neil cut the line, cool as anything, as usual. Andy did not hold it against him but, once again, against his handset, which he bashed on the desk again and again until the earpiece snapped. For a second Andy watched it swing, dangling off a sad precarious little piece of cable. In two weeks on the desk this was the third handset Elisabeth had watched Andy destroy. The rest of the team had recently moved on to high tech headsets, but Andy didn’t like wearing those– or bashing them. He stood up and walked to the helpdesk for some new, old-fashioned gear. To his right, Master Yoda stroked his bald patch then his chin, then announced in a gravelly cockney voice that he was going for a smoke. To Andy’s left, Newbie let out an audible sigh of relief, his big white square jawed face flushed with the effort of not showing fear. And where, you might ask, was their illustrious leader, bald-as-a-coot "Wavy", the (knuckle) Head of the London Trading Desk? 

  
He was in all likelihood upstairs, chummying up to the Executive Committee and trying to pass the buck or, in this case, the 20 million loss, Sterling. The last half hour before the market open was when the higher ups lived up to their name, migrating en masse to the canteen on the top floor and taking it over with the sheer size of their combined egos. Woe betide the mere mortal who dared to show her face there between 7:30 and 8:am. 

On, then, went Elisabeth Bennet’s invisibility cloak. Safe behind a 15 page veil of Greek letters she eavesdropped on some C-suite, Executive Level, truly world-beating arse-covering. The Head of Portfolio Management, for instance, whilst stirring his porridge maintained that he had never asked Andy to do the trade. Elisabeth distinctly remembered hearing him do precisely that, yesterday about 3:pm, in person and at the kind of volume that makes it hard for a harmless quant to concentrate on her SQL queries. Wavy swore he “had the broker by the goolies”, though Elisabeth had literally just heard evidence to the contrary. Besides, with the story making the Financial Times’ Lex column, the bank’s financial loss was fast becoming the least of its problems. Fear not: the Head of Public Relations was on the case. He’d “give that little bitch’s editor such a god almighty bollocking, if they didn’t retract this and sack her, they could go and fuck themselves, he’d leak the interim results to the fucking Guardian this year.” Head of Legal, meanwhile, could see no evidence of malpractice, which was only to be expected from someone paid so handsomely never to look for any. Similarly, the Head of Risk reassured anyone who cared to ask (they were few) that no exact figure could as yet be put on what he euphemistically called the “event”. Having heard all she cared to hear, Elisabeth turned her lively mind to the equations in front of her, and headed back to the desk. 

Reading the _American Journal of Quantitative Financial Studies_ can be like wearing the perfect Spanx. As an invisibility cloak Elisabeth found it so comfortable, she’d forget she was wearing it, and bump into all manners of things. On her exit from the lift a splash of coffee, followed by a deep voiced expletive, alerted her that she should have stopped reading sooner. She muttered a reluctant apology and, having ascertained that she’d not spilled any coffee on anyone but herself, she hurried behind the reception desk for some tissues to pat dry first her precious equations, then her shirt sleeve and neck. She heard no echo of her apology while she did this. Instead when she looked up again this tall man was clearing his throat and… excuse me, what? 

The man was handing her his coat. 

She was, in fairness to him, standing behind the reception desk and Kate Atkinson, third floor receptionist and ditz extraordinaire, was once again AWOL. Still, did Elizabeth look to this guy like a coat-checking receptionist? Did receptionists read American econometrics papers? Or couldn’t he tell the _American Journal of Quantitative Financial Studies_ from _Cosmo_? When Elisabeth got over herself long enough to take a closer look at this miscreant, this Spoiler of Coffee and Good Equations, she realised that he looked almost as incongruous standing there in his sharp suit, as she must do behind the reception desk. Was the bank looking for someone to pose shirtless for its next ad campaign? He’s fit that bill, yes, thank you very much, but last time she checked PR operated out of the first floor, and this was three: where the real dealing happened. Could Gillette man over there not even count to the number of blades in a razor?   
Naah, this guy must be a client. The bank’s best ever looking client, though somewhat lacking in basic manners - and in hair. His skull was freshly shaved, but what with the quality shirt and tie the effect was more Yul Brynner than scary skinhead. Scary Yul Brynner maybe, what with the permafrown. 

OK, so client, then. Clients, however weird, bald, obnoxious or good looking, pay bankers salaries and must therefore be indulged. Elisabeth forced on a smile, invited the man to sit down onto the reception’s square-edged black leather sofa, and grabbed his coat. It had real weight to it: a very nice coat, of thick dense and amazingly soft navy wool. She felt sure Kate Atkinson would have gone about it in a more graceful and indeed gracious manner, but after some faffing around with the handle-less doors of the wardrobe, and some clattering of redundant hangers onto the floor, Elisabeth managed to hang the damn thing up. She returned to the sofa, where the man took a brief break from frowning at her to retrieve something from the inside pocket of his suit jacket.   
“Good morning, sir, welcome to...”  
He didn’t let her finish, but handed her a folded piece of A4. 

  
Oh. Dear. 

“Interview schedule for Fitzwilliam Kingsley-Darcy, 13-09-1999” read the first line, and despite a rising sense of panic Elisabeth couldn’t quite suppress a snigger. Will? Will Kingsley? Will Kingsley’s full name was Fitz, excuse-my-French-but-Fitz-bloody-William Kingsley-Darcy? Oh, this was bad. Very very bad. Worse than she’d expected, and Elisabeth usually prided herself on preparing for the worst. A slight blush, which Will no doubt put down to her ineptitude at hanging coats, followed a sharp intake of breath. What would Kate Atkinson do?   
“Can I offer you a tea or coffee?”  
“Coffee, black.”  
“Coffee, black, please,” she couldn’t help reply, and made for the vending machine. What to do? Safe inside the tiny kitchen she punched 32 into the machine, leant one hip against the counter, crossed her arms and did what she did best: she thought about it. 

Things happen for a reason, they say, generally about bad things. For instance, perhaps the reason she’d languished for so long as a "quant" on the bank’s Equity Research team without any prospect of promotion was not just because she was a woman, and spoke with a bit of an accent. Maybe it was so that they could dump the mad-cap, no-hope projects on her, like modelling the costs of trading. And maybe the reason she managed to do that, despite the terrible data and the piss-poor CPU on the research servers, wasn’t just so the bank could save on the commissions they paid brokers. Maybe she did all that so that when the new Head of Trading in New York asked who “did T-cost modelling” in the UK, her name would be the only one to come up. Maybe she crunched all those numbers for all those years so that Raj, that was his name, would invite her on secondment to New York for six months. Maybe all that thankless work had been the means of her eventual escape. Out of London and to the US. Out of the flat she shared with Mike and into a tiny beige corporate studio in Manhattan, which she now thought of as her chrysalis. Out of it she came, ready to head back to London for a new life without Mike, and for a new career. It involved dragging the traders kicking and screaming into the next millennium, from phones and paper tickets to the glory of a real time, fully electronic trading system called tradePad. 

She’d be her own team, of one to start with but yes, she’d be in charge, finally and officially. She’d report directly to Raj who, as boss of all the bank’s traders across four continents, had already got a small team started on tradePad in New York. They’d taught Elisabeth all they knew before sending her back to London and now here she was: on the UK Trading Desk, or Desk for short because traders are too busy and self important to speak in full sentences. Well never mind traders: Elisabeth now reported directly to the Global Head of Trading. Not so bad for a 28 year old female with a bit of an accent. 

There were only two catches with Raj’s grand vision. One: the London traders laboured under the misapprehension that Elisabeth was going to code them out of a job, and therefore loathed her. Nothing she hadn’t expected or indeed encountered before: a woman with her kind of skill-base, in the olden days they’d have burnt her for a witch. They’d soon see the light, when their commissions halved and they couldn’t screw up a trade like Andy just had, not if they tried. But this led to catch number two: Raj needed to replace Wavy with a dynamic young Head of Trading in London, one who wasn’t quite as scared of a computer and would support the tradePad vision. Raj was tremendously excited to have headhunted one Will Kingsley, ex Goldman Sachs, ex some hedge fund or other, to lead the tradePad implementation from the trading side while she, well -she did all the work, as usual. 

It’s another truth universally acknowledged that Goldman bankers are arrogant, greedy, power grabbing, credit stealing bastards. Often clever with it, but no one in their right mind would look forward to sharing a pencil sharpener with someone from Goldman, let alone a project like tradePad. In this too, however, Elisabeth had soon bowed to Raj’s superior wisdom. Her first day on the desk was enough to persuade her that any Goldman guy would be better than that shouty, red-braced, leery old dinosaur: Wavy.   
Thinking about Will now, she supposed she’d only expected him to be a standard issue trader: aggressive, a bit thick of neck and intellect. And also arrogant, because of the Goldman thing. But nothing had prepared her for the full six feet of _this_ double-barrelled arrogance. And she’d certainly never expected him to expect her to hang his coat and fetch him coffee. A sexist, arrogant, preposterously-named pain in the backside then. What would Kate Atkinson do? 

Wait: who cared what Kate would do? What Elisabeth did, was walk back to reception with a 1000-Watt smile on her face, and a 32 from the vending machine served over a green recycled paper serviette. Pure class. This she served to Will, neither spilling a drop nor dropping her smile. She then plonked herself next to him on the sofa and picked up the phone on the coffee table. He looked in horror from her to the dashboard behind the reception desk and back, tried to shrink away from her but he couldn’t: she had him cornered against the opposite armrest.   
“Hi!” she said when HR picked up, then swivelled to face Will as she spoke. “Good morning, it’s Elisabeth. Bennet, yes. From the Trading Desk,” she said slowly, so he wouldn’t miss it. “I’ve literally just bumped into Will Kingsley, he’s here for his interviews...? Yes, no, mine's not 'til this afternoon. Shall I tell him you’ll be down soon?... OK, thanks then, bye!”   
She hung up and stood up, the better to beam down at him:  
“Delighted to meet you at last, Will. I'll see you later, do enjoy that coffee!” she said, and left him to it. 

***

It was only a short walk back to the desk, diagonally across a glass-walled, marble-floored atrium. But half way there her face dropped: Justine from HR, aka the Angel of Career Death, aka Head of Sackings, was handing Wavy the Cardboard Box of Doom, and explaining that he couldn’t bring home the personalised mousepad he’d won at some broker do, because it was “a company asset”. Andy fumed, Newbie blushed to the tip of his blonde hair, Yoda shook his head, Elisabeth stared, dumbstruck, and only Neil, despite his young years, looked squarely at what was going on. When the cardboard box was packed he walked over to Wavy, shook his hand and said:  
“It's been an honour, boss.” 

Elisabeth thought of her own boss, Raj. Unlike Wavy he wasn’t scared of a computer and you had to hand it to him: Efficiency was his middle name. She liked that in any human, but in a boss, and after years of putting up with double PhDs with the dynamism and charisma of menopausal sea slugs, it was especially refreshing. Using the time difference with New York to his advantage, he’d recognised the opportunity presented by Andy’s balls up, and pounced. A higher up paying with his career for the misdeeds of his underling: this had to be a first at the bank. It usually worked the other way around: the bosses screwed up and the underlings carried the can. So there was some poetic justice in this sacking, for sure. And it was all for the good of tradePad but still: not even Wavy deserved to be sent off without leaving drinks, a whip-round and a company mousepad.   
Elisabeth sighed and opened her Inbox:

\----------------------------------------

From: Mike_perso <Michael_Ronson@gmail.com>

To: Elisabeth R. Bennet, WBC UK Ltd.   
Sent: Tue, 13 September, 08:12  
Re: Heard you’re back.   
Hello darling. Can I still call you that? I’m sorry, perhaps you’d rather not hear from me just yet but our friends tell me that you’re back from New York and I’m thinking of you. I hope you’re doing OK. I’d love to speak to you. Is that all right?   
Love   
Mike

\----------------------------------------

An uneasy mix of guilt and panic seized her chest. No, it wasn’t all right. Not all right at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> copyright 2021 Mel Liffragh, all rights reserved.


	2. Games Night

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Elisabeth makes some interesting new friends, and an impetuous decision

‘Well of course it wasn’t an interview at all,’ Elisabeth said to Charlotte that evening, as she walked down an increasingly dark Holloway Road. It was nice to hear a familiar voice in such unfamiliar surroundings, but speaking into a mobile phone around here, albeit only a work one, felt like walking around with a _Mug me_ hat and a target on her back. 

‘Still, it was nice of Raj to put you on Will’s interview schedule in the first place,’ Charlotte pointed out.

‘Very nice, very considerate. He was making a point, pretending that I mattered, which Toad had to contradict by over running 35 minutes into my 45 minute slot.’

‘Nice! Remind me who’s Toad again?’

‘Chief Investment Officer, he was my boss’s boss until Raj became my boss. Looks like a frog, is in fact a lazy pig, likes expensive cars?’

‘Oh that’s right, got him now!’

‘To be fair, around our office that could describe any number of people. Anyway, as soon as Toad was gone it was more like Will was interviewing me, so I told him about my spreadsheet.’

‘Do I want you to tell me about your spreadsheet?’, Charlotte asked, acting infinitely dumber than she was. Charlotte Lucas may be bottle blonde, but her acting the ditz was very much that: an act. She swore it helped if you worked in Events. 

‘It calculates a profit and loss on all their open orders, updates prices in real time, all in one place, with the alpha scores and my forecast volume numbers and…’

‘I get the idea.’

‘It’s a really good spreadsheet, Charlotte, do you know how much work it was figuring out how to pull data from the order management system and real time prices from Reuters? I don’t know how I managed to get it all working from scratch in under two weeks, despite the mess the Data Team had made of the Sedol to RICs mapping table. Anyway, Will slags my spreadsheet off saying it didn’t seem to help Andy last night, which on the face of it is fair enough.’

‘Except?’

‘Except that, as I pointed out to him, Andy wasn’t using my spreadsheet last night. Because Andy hates spreadsheets. Because you can’t bash spreadsheets against desks. So I suggested to Will that maybe when he got the top job he could start with persuading Andy, Shifu and Newbie to use said spreadsheet until tradePad was live, and we left it at that.’

‘Gosh, the guy must hate you.’

‘And the feeling’s mutual but hey, looking on the bright side: unlike Wavy he didn’t so much as peek at my chest. Not a bouncing glance, nothing. He’s not all bad.’

Charlotte laughed, whose own G-cup Assets Under Management had received more than their share of unwanted attention over the years. Then, with her unique knack for flipping in and out of moods, she dropped the blonde act: 

‘But… to be clear: what would have happened if Andy had been running your magic spreadsheet last night?’

‘Instead of talking football with whatever broker, he would have spotted what was going on, called the bank that was ramping the price up and pulled the order.’

‘So you wouldn’t have lost 20 million?’

‘Hey, _I_ didn’t lose 20 million.’

‘But Andy wouldn’t have either.’

‘Correct.’

Silence. Elisabeth checked the signal on her phone. 

‘Well, perhaps you’re right and spreadsheets are cool,’ Charlotte said in the end, and changed tones all over again: ‘But that’s not why I called. Are you free for games night on Friday?’

Elisabeth had missed six of Charlotte’s monthly games nights while in New York, and how she had missed them! A games night was precisely what she needed the way this week was shaping up, and yet… She made a mental note that she’d just crossed road number three on her left, and therefore only had two more to go, then she said:

‘That sounds brilliant, Charlotte, but I guess Mike’s coming, right?’

‘Oh don’t worry about Mike! He’s fine, he’s totally forgiven you!’

Charlotte often spoke in exclamation marks: the woman had too much energy for any other form of punctuation. Yet to Elisabeth’s trained ear, her friend’s tone came across as just slightly forced. 

‘He’s forgiven me?’ 

‘I know, I know. But it’s pretty big of him, actually, if you think about it.’

Only Elisabeth didn’t like to think about it, because that did not reflect well on her. Nowadays, whenever she was forced to re-examine her actions of ‘before New York’, those actions felt so out of character, they might as well have been those of a stranger. Why she’d cheated on Mike on that particular night and with that particular man was obvious: her one-night stand, a Swedish painter, was sex on legs. He’d hit on her unrelentingly the whole evening, and by then Mike had been so stupidly jealous for so long, that she’d easily convinced herself after barely half a Mojito that she might as well give him grounds to be. 

But as to why and how she and Mike had got to that point after seven sensible, companionable years, that was still a mystery. Why had things unravelled on that night rather than, say, two months before or two years later? Now, with hindsight – which, as every quant knows, is a wonderful thing - the separation was beginning to acquire an air of inevitability, for her at least. Enough of an air of inevitability, in any case, that she could not contemplate returning to the flat in Canonbury. 

Six months ago such a decision had felt anything but clear or inevitable. Back then there had been endless discussions, arguments and even genuine efforts and apologies, on both sides. But after months of apologising over the Swedish painter, Elisabeth would have had to start apologising for the fresh betrayal that was her impending departure to New York, and she’d found that she couldn’t. Though the idea of the New York secondment was at least as scary as it was exciting, Elisabeth had dug her heels in as only she could. Mike didn’t think she would go ahead with it, which was another red-flag-to-bull scenario: she’d packed up, moved out and boarded that plane, terrified but determined to prove him wrong. 

‘Anyway, don’t worry!’ Elisabeth was saying meanwhile, ‘You come along on Saturday, and I will put you and Mike on the same mini ping-pong team. Before you know it you’ll be heading back to your flat together and everything will be just like before!’

‘Oh, Charlotte, I don’t want things to be like before!’ 

‘Really?’ Charlotte asked, astonished. ‘Really? Zab, you’ve had your break, you’ve had your space and your time to think, do you still feel that way?’

‘Ha!’

‘What?’

Elisabeth didn’t answer. Charlotte made it sound as if ‘feeling that way’ was an indulgence, a luxury, when in actual fact it meant lugging a chest-crushing guilt around all day, and taking it to bed most nights. This guilt was a many-headed hydra: she didn’t just feel bad over the appalling way in which she’d left Mike, no. What she would never forgive herself, was falling out of love with him. 

Elisabeth had never liked being wrong, and in the professional sphere was almost never found to be so. It was unfortunate, then, that when it came to Mike she was having to admit she had quite possibly been wrong for a whole seven years. It was still a struggle. Whenever she took a break from kicking herself over it, it was only to reprimand herself for her selfishness. Surely she should be feeling much worse for Mike than for herself. What was her wounded pride to his broken heart? She had, after all, abandoned him in the most callous manner. 

Rinse, repeat, ad infinitam. Oh wait, was that street number six? 

She found the name plate halfway up a yellow brick wall and turned in:

‘Charlotte, I’m almost there, I’m going to have to hang up soon.’

‘Seriously, Zab, why you are doing this?’

‘Mostly because Lily Cheng.’

‘Lily Cheng? _The_ Lily Cheng? You kept in touch with _her_?’

‘What? Of course not! Haven’t seen her since Uni, but I had to bump into her during my lunchbreak today, and somehow in between blowing smoke in my face and name dropping she got me to reveal I was couch surfing at my brother’s, the minx.’

‘That she is. I bet you loved the passive smoking though.’

‘I loved it. In fact it was more like passive-aggressive smoking. Anyway, Lily’s got these friends, blah blah, and before I could think of a polite way to get out of it she’d called them and arranged it all.'

'Damn those mobile phones, hey?' Charlotte joked, who had been an early adopter. 

'In this case, yes. And now that I’m here I have to say, it looks like a right dump. I wonder what it says Lily thinks about me.’

‘Oh, Zab! You don’t have to do this…’

‘Don’t worry, I’ll be in an out in a minute, and I don’t think I’m being stalked or anything.’

She turned to double check, but no. 

‘I meant please don’t do anything… irreversible. You know you don’t need to move out of your flat.’

‘But I want to. No cross that, I do need to.’

‘Zab… will you come Saturday?’

‘I’ll think about it but look, I’m sorry but I just got there. I’ll speak to you later. Love to Colin!’

Half a dozen steps led her down to a blue door. No door bell. She knocked. Above her head where the steps to the raised ground floor of the same house. The door opened and revealed a young man a little taller than herself, and a naked shop dummy tattooed from bald head to chipped toes in bright crayon doodles. The sort one would draw on the longest most boring telephone call ever – and a lot of mind altering drugs. 

For a moment Elisabeth was too distracted to look at the young man. When she did she found he had a pleasant enough face, pale and flat with mousy brown hair, and an air of surprise, as if she were the weird thing about this situation. 

‘Hello, I’m Elisabeth, Lily sent me. Are you Ben or Mac?’

He nodded at her to come in and closed the door after her. It was a very small hallway and still no one was mentioning the elephant, or rather dummy in the room. OK, well, these were after all friends of Lily Cheng. 

Either Ben or Mac opened the door to a lounge. You might have called it a sitting room, except the only place to sit was a half-collapsed sofa facing the TV. Eastenders on mute. Noise, of a strumming nature, coming from somewhere above. 

Behind Eastenders, running the entire length of the outside wall, more interesting art, this time a four-foot-wide fresco on black paper depicting severed limbs in… space? Manky carpet – well, Lily had warned her that Ben and Mac were “boys”. To the right an alcove kitchen in what would one day be collectible, vintage 80s style. For the time being it was just ugly, white with red trim and too many sharp corners. Not actually that messy though, considering. But it smelt of baked beans which Elisabeth, despite being French and therefore eating almost anything, held to be the very food of the devil. 

Either Ben or Mac, continued to stare at her in silence and it was all getting a tad awkward when heavy footsteps were heard. Another, taller young man came in from a door on the other side of the kitchen. He was quite a vision: the wrong side of slim, sausaged into faded ripped black jeans, with a dangle of waist chains, a too-tight white vest and a ginger mohawk sort of haircut. Punk? So, _so_ interesting. Also, what on earth made Lily Cheng she might want to live here? 

‘Hello! I’m Mac,’ he said enthusiastically, and shook her hand. A punk on a business meeting with a bass voice and a posh accent. He was starting to make more sense as a friend of Lily, if perhaps not as a prospective flatmate.

‘Hi, Mac, I’m Elisabeth.’

‘Is it really true your name’s Lizzie Bennet?’ the other one then asked, who by a process of elimination must be Ben. He too had a surprisingly deep though not at all unpleasant voice. Ben and Mac looked at each other and didn’t even pretend to hide their snigger.

‘My name is _Elisabeth_ Bennet, yes,’ she said in deliberate French.

‘Oh, I was wondering where your accent was from. You don’t sound French.’

‘Dad’s British and I was raised bilingual, but in France.’

‘Whereabouts, Paris?’ Mac asked eagerly.

‘Hardly: smalltown Burgundy.’ 

‘Good wine country,’ Mac remarked, aptly. Quite the poshest out-of-date-punk ever to roam the mean streets of N17. 

‘They never watched _Pride and Prejudice_ in France, then?’ Ben asked. 

‘It’s not nearly as big as here and besides, Colin Firth must have been, what, ten when I was born? The thing is my French Granma was called Elisabeth and as the first grand daughter Mum swears my first name was never up for negotiation. You get used to it after a while. As long as people don’t call me Lizzie.’

‘So how come you need a flat?’ 

‘I’m in between…’

In between jobs? Not quite. Boyfriends? Not really, but that’s very much how she felt: in between. 

‘Lily said you work for a bank,’ Ben said, in the all too familiar tone of “people who don’t like people who work for banks”. 

‘Aha, but I’m just a quant.’

‘A what?’

‘I do research, it’s a bit complicated but basically...’

‘Ben’s doing a PhD in Biochemistry,’ Mac interrupted.

‘OK, not as complicated as that,’ she said. 

‘Can’t you afford anything nicer than here?’ Ben asked, instead of beating around the bush. He was being more like the traders on the Desk than he knew: show-me-the-money school of straight to the point. The French half of her liked that about the traders - and by extension about Ben too.

‘Truth is, I’m already paying half the mortgage on another flat so yes, this is all I can afford for now.’

‘How come?’ Ben asked.

‘Soon to be ex-boyfriend. Long story, but I’m not going back there.’

‘But then you shouldn’t still be paying the mortgage,’ Mac said, very reasonably. Maybe he was a punk accountant or something. 

‘I haven’t quite sorted it out yet. Anyway… so where’s the room?’ Elisabeth said, because the sooner she saw it the sooner she could say it was too small or too big or too North facing or simply too much like a basement, and get the hell out of here. 

Mac led the way and, as they passed through the door and into a short corridor, Elisabeth noticed a bookshelf next to the telly, with cool 1930s American novels at the top and home recorded VHS of cricket at the bottom. 

Mac pointed up some stairs to his room, then walked on. There was a small shower room and toilet under the stairs, as grotty as expected but Mac explained that her room had an _en suite_. He was very much going for _en francais dans le texte_ so she didn’t have the heart to tell him that no one says _en suite_ _en France_. They say _une chambre avec salle de bain_ , which takes longer. Maybe the joke was on the French on this one. 

Ben’s room was behind the door at the end of the corridor. Mac opened another door on the left and said:

‘Here you are.’

‘Thanks.’

It wasn’t _that_ bad. If you ignored the stained old mattress on the grotty carpet. And the powder blue metal-leaf horror of a chandelier. There were French doors to the right, opening on a small terrace but letting in plenty of light. The bathroom was predictably “vintage”, a salmon pink suite but recently cleaned, and water came out gushing and hot out of all the taps – she checked. The built-in wardrobe opposite the French doors was bigger than what she used to share with Mike. She tested the sliding doors: they glided perfectly, and she took a step back.

‘These yours?’ she asked Ben, pointing at a row of vigorous marijuana plants. 

‘Shit!’ he said, his face frozen, his round eyes getting even rounder. Now that she saw him shocked, Elisabeth realised that the look of mild astonishment on Ben’s face so far was just his default look. 

‘Shit? I suppose that’s one word for it,’ she said, and smiled. Ben carried on gaping at the wardrobe and the wardrobe carried on gaping back at him, so she shut it.

‘It’s all right, don’t worry, I take it they’re not yours then?’ she asked. 

‘They’re Tom’s,’ Ben said, and it was a considerable relief to hear him regain the use of speech. 

‘That would be your ex-flatmate?’

‘It’s the sunniest part of the flat.’ Ben said.

Thankfully, after eight years at the bank Elisabeth was used to people not answering her questions. 

‘Tom must have green thumbs,’ she said, ‘These look really healthy.’

Back in Canonbury, Elisabeth had grown a lovely herb garden in her window boxes, but killed every single indoor plant ever presented to her by well-meaning visitors. 

They filed back into the living room, and _now_ things got really awkward. The bedroom wasn’t too small or too big, or too North facing or even too much like a basement. She couldn’t even fault the plumbing, but did that mean she wanted to live with these two? The ugly one was quite nice, the nice looking one was… almost certainly the graphic artist of the two. Unless green-thumbed Tom had made that mad fresco and crayoned that poor dummy. Elisabeth looked at the bookshelf again, weighed the American novels against the cricket tapes, weighed the house plants against the plate of baked beans on the side of the cooker. 

‘So what is it you do?’ she asked Mac, to buy time.

‘I’m a musician.’

‘Marvellous,’ she lied, based on what she’d heard before he came down. 

‘I’m the bass player in Dead’n Gone, have you heard of us? We did a Peel session last year.’

Of all the shitty indie bands, and some good ones, that Mike had taken her to hear over the years, Dead’n Gone wasn’t one of them.

‘I haven’t, but I’m pretty sure I like the early ones better.’

Mac smiled. 

And then, just as she ran out of ideas, her phone buzzed. Apart from the traders and Raj only about half a dozen people had the number. Seven now, with Lily Cheng, damn her. So even if Elisabeth hadn’t at that point been desperate for a diversion, she’d probably still have been quite excited at getting a text. 

‘Sorry about this,’ she said, and retreated to the corridor.

A text from a new number. How exciting! 

_hi elisabeth it’s mike guess what i just got a phone charlotte says you might come saturday i can not wait to see you_

Her heart sank, then briefly lapsed into her too-familiar pity for Mike, who couldn’t have waited until he’d figured out punctuation, capital letters or indeed txt speech before messaging her. He must have spent ages typing this, she could picture him hunching short-sightedly over the keys – as indeed she had on the rare occasions she had texted. What Nokia should do, is come up with something like what she used to write UNIX shell-scripts at work, where you hit tab and the computer auto completes with the most likely next word. Or maybe just come up with a phone with a full mini qwerty keyboard. Naah, probably would never happen. They couldn't make keys that small and the English language had too many words. They'd be stuck with "CU l8tr" for all eternity. 

Elisabeth sighed as she re-read Mike's text. Her heart sank further, and then a little bit further again, until she knew what to do:

‘So, could I possibly move in on Saturday?’ she asked when she re-entered the lounge. 

They nodded and, lest she was mistaken, high fived behind her back while she wrote the deposit cheque.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> copyright 2021 Mel Liffragh, all rights reserved.


	3. Never Mind

‘I’m sorry, don’t mind me, I’m in a terrible mood.’

Elisabeth pinched her lips and said nothing: this was one dangerously winning smile Thomas Wickham Lorcan George Reilly was throwing at the floor right now. It transformed him beyond recognition. He started rubbing the back of his head with a long, chewed-nailed, nicotine-stained hand, and looked back up.

‘I’ve just been dumped.’

‘I see,’ she said, curious that her curiosity should be piqued. 

Thus far this evening, the former occupant of her room in Archway had proved a humourless, irritable individual in the Fitzwilliam Kingsley-Darcy mould. Hence the fact that after an almost two-hour acquaintance he and Elisabeth were still on full first, middle and last names basis. Hence too the fact that so far she’d seen nothing in him other than an angry young Irishman. His forehead was broad and pale, as were his cheekbones. His face narrowed into a triangular chin. His mouth was wide, red and angry, the eyes green and angry, even the shock of black hair on top looked angry. All wrapped up in beat up jeans and a pissed-off looking dark green sweater unravelling at the cuffs and collar. 

Now all of a sudden he was announcing he was single and shooting her this cutest of am-I-drunk-or-is-it-looking-at-you looks. You know, the kind where eyes light up and sparkle for your eyes only. The kind so very cute, in fact, that Elisabeth suspected a signature flirting manoeuvre. 

She had to hand it to Tom, it was a good one. She tucked her hair back and reminded herself that she was not in Oxford tonight to pick up an angry young man, Irish or otherwise, but merely the boxes of her stuff still left at her brother's. 

That was what she’d told Charlotte anyway. In practice they both knew she was here to dodge mini ping-pong with Mike. 

Ben and Mac had driven her over in Dead’n Gone’s van, an orange VW camper they called “The Moonbus”. Tomorrow they were driving back via Hampstead and helping her pick up her stuff. It was really kind of them, offering to help her move in and asking her along to their blokes night out. She’d rather have been playing Twister against Charlotte, who despite her ample proportions has never been beaten at it, than listening to some of the bands playing tonight. But on the other hand her new flatmates were definitely making an effort for her and as all traders know: you win some, you lose some. 

‘Aren’t you gonna go and sound check?’ she asked Tom.

‘Not yet. Bombshell’s on first,’ he said, still with that beguiling look. 

‘I see, different bands.’ 

Bombshell was another friend of her new flatmates: Tom’s new landlord and their host in Oxford tonight. Save for the platinum hair falling in a thick curtain over his eyebrows, Elisabeth did not think he lived up to his nickname. That fat bumbling young toryboy journalist maybe, what was his name, Boris Johnson? He might have been closer to the mark. Meanwhile Tom’s eyes were still sparkling away at Elisabeth, so she reached for a fresh and neutral topic of conversation:

‘So you nervous?’

‘What?’

‘Stage-fright perhaps?’

If anything, Tom now turned the eye sparkle up a notch, so that Elisabeth felt herself blush, wondering whether she’d just blurted out another one of her classic involuntary double-entendres. Like that time shortly after moving to London when she’d told a classmate that he “should have made her come” to his tutorial presentation on Eugene Fama’s critique of the Capital Asset Pricing Model. Likewise now, Elisabeth began to wonder whether “stage-fright” was indeed the right translation of the much more alliterative French word “trac”. 

‘Stage-fright? That’s funny. Why would you say that?’ 

The venue for this open mic was the basement of a small pub in Summertown, and as the crowd thickened and Bombshell's band sound checked she had to raise her voice and lean closer to Tom to explain the obvious: 

‘Well, I don’t know, you’re about to go on stage, I’m just asking…’

‘You really _are_ funny,’ he said, pulling back and examining her. ‘I’m glad Lily found you: good advice,’ he nodded.

‘What's good advice?’

‘Staying trite,’ he said during a lull in the stage noise. ‘That’s probably what this crowd is in for tonight.’

She frowned from him to the floor and back, none the wiser. 

‘Staying what?’

‘Trite.’

As he said that, Bombshell’s band’s guitarist decided to test the tremolo arm on his Strat, which sent an ear-splitting wave of Larsen feedback through the room. 

‘WHAT?’ she shouted at Tom.

‘TRITE! WHAT YOU JUST SAID!’

The noise stopped before he'd stopped shouting. 

‘No, I didn’t,’ she replied, disappointed. ‘What does trite mean?’

Trite, she feared, must be another one of those exasperating English words, like _eke_ and _divot._ It was deceptively short, and yet impossible to decipher because it sounded neither like what it was, as a _bumblebee_ kindly does, nor like what it was in French - as does, say, _prevarication_. Tom did not care to enlighten her as to its meaning, but carried on smiling, most likely at her expense. 

‘So what DID you say?’ he asked while the lead guitarist tweaked something, played a few more chords, and started another deafening feedback loop. 

‘STA-GE FFFFFRIGHT!’ she yelled. ‘QUESTION MARK!’ she added, miming the punctuation for extra clarity. 

‘OH.’ 

They stopped shouting to turn to the stage as the band started to play. They all seemed to be enjoying themselves. Their songs were loud and energetic. Mac shuffled in from the back to join Elisabeth and Tom. He knew the lyrics and was nodding his head in time to the beat. Mike had made her stand through much worse, Elisabeth reminded herself. 

‘ ‘ like their new drummer.’ Mac said. She assumed he was talking to Tom, but if either of them had asked her the drummer had more to offer decoratively than musically. This was no idle opinion either, but one based on her twelve years’ study of classical percussions back in France. However, since Elisabeth was even more fed up with jokes about the triangle than with jokes about her Frenchisms, she kept this particular skill of hers quiet. Hence, as always happened around the office too, no one sought her opinion, well informed though it would have been. Instead Tom nodded back at Mac:

‘New one.’ he said at the start of the sixth and, mercifully, last song. New drummer or new song? She never found out: Tom vanished backstage before the song was over, just as Ben showed up with another round of beers.

‘Still on water?’ Mac asked her as Ben handed her a glass. 

‘Yep!’ she replied as cheerfully as possible, though Ben was shooting her a less than flat-matey look. Or perhaps that was just his face. Anyway, she was starting to appreciate why the audience needed to numb their senses with alcohol tonight: it wasn’t the worst gig she’d been to, but it was pretty far from the best either. 

Tom was stooped, stage left, over his bass. He was doing that thing guys who can’t dance do when they’re called upon to, flexing his knees up and down, like a hunch-backed Jack-in-the-box. Meanwhile a short guy with lovely black curls and a beard stood bolt upright centre stage, stroking an acoustic guitar and singing up to the ceiling in a mellifluous voice and a Northern accent, something about ego rhyming with mango and finishing in let it go, let it go, let it go. It was much nicer than she’d expected: light, fast, with a jaunty polka beat on a minor key tune. But the second song was trying to sound angry. Just like Tom himself it succeeded, if anything, a little too well. 

Halfway through Elisabeth’s eyes wandered back towards Tom, and she found him looking at her. He was sucking his cheek in, concentrating on his chords, his face otherwise expressionless. She wondered whether that was what was meant by ‘trite’. She’d have to Google it at work, since it didn’t look like the flat had cable or a dictionary. 

The band carried on for another five songs; the upbeat ones always the best in her opinion. More than once she caught her foot tapping to the music, and more than once she caught Tom looking her way. Each time she hoped it was his ex he was thinking of up there, with that pale angry face. 

***

When he came back down he was dripping with sweat. Elisabeth hadn’t appreciated the physical demands of bouncing up and down under the spotlights. Back when she wo-manned the big copper timpanies at the back of the regional philharmonic, she was expected to remain still and poker straight as she counted bars in her gold-embroidered uniform. Early composers were the worst, the Bachs and Handels of this world, keeping the percussionists idle for hundreds of bars at a time in between the odd bombastic crash. Up on her platform at the back of the stage she had one chance only: for that short 128th bar she was a soloist, preferably a loud and flamboyant soloist, so she had to get the count exactly right because the conductor was too busy keeping the brass section in tempo to give her her cue. Her brain had got so used to it over the years, to this day she would start counting to any repetitive patterns her brain picked on, all of its own accord. Borderline autistic, which back then wasn’t yet cool, but thankfully it was already part of the job description for quants. 

Tom had taken off his green sweater and was sporting a once-white t-shirt which, now it was wet, stuck alluringly to his boyish chest. She tried hard not to stare but thought he might have noticed anyway. Mac handed him the beer he’d saved for him, and he started gulping it down. 

‘Liked it?’ he asked, but he wasn’t looking at either of them.

‘Yes, that was nice,’ she offered lamely. ‘What are you guys called again?’

‘Trite.’

‘Very funny. No really: what are you called?’

‘Never mind.’

‘Oh come on!’ she laughed, ‘What?’

‘No, they’re called, “Never Mind”.’ Mac intervened with a concerned look on his face. 

‘Oh,’ she said ‘OK, sorry.’

‘Anyway, where did we get you from, Elisabeth Ruth Bennet? How come you needed my old room?’ Tom asked, putting his empty pint down and crossing his long arms. The angry young man was back in town, and she wondered what to say to make him go away again and call back his sparkly-eyed doppelganger instead. 

‘I just came back from the New York,’ she said in the end. 

‘Why?’ 

‘Because I’m British, and I like living in England?’

‘Ha ha!’ he glowered at her, arms still crossed. Who did that remind her of? Oh that's right: Will Kingsley when she was telling him about the spreadsheet. Well at least with Tom she wouldn't have to see him ever again after tonight. 

‘And why don’t you have your own place?’ he asked, head cocked back, eyes still a-glower. Gosh, it really was uncanny, now she thought about it. And ironic too. Tom and Will looked nothing like each other. In fact the Golden Boy and the young Trustafarian would almost certainly have despised each other on sight.

But they'd definitely have agreed to despise _her_ on sight _more_. 

Go figure. Maybe it was her accent, or just her voice. She had the kind of childish, high-pitched voice they had to coach out of Margaret Thatcher before they let her give speeches. Oh well, never mind indeed. You can't go around pleasing everyone. Elisabeth took a deep breath and made a conscious effort to sound and look neutral, indifferent, and above all not as hostile as she felt. Which wasn't easy when it came to discussing Mike. 

‘Well I was buying a place,’ she said, ‘but I moved out before I went to the US. Things weren’t all that great with my own Mr Right anymore, if you must know.’

Her attempt to channel her inner Iron Lady had failed miserably. She ended in a mumble. Why was she bringing Mike up anyway? Perhaps, just perhaps, something to do with Tom’s wet t-shirt and ex-girlfriend? Meanwhile now Mac seemed to prick up his ears, so she turned around to look at him. At which he looked down, went beetroot red, nodded at Tom, harrumphed and headed for the bar. Elisabeth smiled after him, but turning back to Tom she found him as angry as ever. 

‘So when you need a break from someone, you’re just “off to New York”, are you?’ he continued, shaking his angry head as preciously as he could. There was perhaps something aristocratic about him. Or perhaps there wasn't and he was just born in the wrong decade, when angry young men weren't the subject of plays anymore. Perhaps that made him even angrier. But the funniest part was to think that somehow he had _her_ down as some kind of Sloane Ranger, based on the fact that she was still sober and trying her best to show good manners to complete and increasingly strange strangers.

‘Look, Tom, I had to go for my work, that’s all. The timing just happened to be spot on,’ she said, and tucked a lose strand of hair back behind her ear.

‘What work?’

‘Computer work. Research... some “knowledge transfer” ’ she shrugged, miming the quotation marks to distance herself from the subject, aware that quantitative finance made neither good dinner-table nor indeed good Saturday-night-indie-gig conversation. 

‘What kind of research?’ asked Tom, craning his head towards her, his arms still crossed. 

‘Market research... nothing interesting really.’

‘Fish markets? Meat markets? Flea markets?’

‘Stock markets.’

She had not thought it possible, but his look turned even more threatening:

‘What, you’re a fucking _banker_?’

‘I am a banker, yes! If you like,’ she said, beginning to feel more disturbed than puzzled by him.

‘I don’t like. I _hate_ people like you,’ he said, with slow deliberate emphasis. 

‘Well, I don’t like to say, but it shows,’ she replied, and crossed her arms too. 

His face relaxed a fraction:

‘You’re just trying to wind me up, aren’t you?’

‘Not at all. But I kind of wish I were.’

‘Why d’ye have to be so bloody chirpy then?’ he muttered, and with one simple question got all her defences right up again. 

She would not have been half as vexed, had she not felt justly accused. Tom did have a point: she ought not to be “so bloody chirpy”, not after reading the texts and emails Mike was now sending her daily. Especially not in the company of one of Lily Cheng’s more idiosyncratic and yet strangely compelling male acquaintances, whom she’d known for all of two hours. 

Then again, she realised as Tom glared on at her, just because she routinely beat herself up for doing a bit too well without Mike, did not give this guy the right to do the same.

‘Well, I’m very sorry that I can’t help being chirpy. But I don’t see how my being miserable would help you in any way.’ 

Tom narrowed his eyes as if he needed a double take, and she realised that perhaps she’d been a little harsh. The guy had after all only just been dumped, so she started again in a more compassionate tone: 

‘But I’m really sorry you’ve had a crap week, Tom, I mean it’s....’

‘Somehow I just want to …,’ he interrupted before she could say: terrible. 

She didn't hear the end of his sentence either, because the next band had started sound check, with the same ear-splitting effect as the previous one. For goodness’ sake, this place...

‘I’m sorry I can’t hear you,’ she mouthed, plugging her ears. 

‘I just want to...’ something something, she heard in a brief lull in the Larsen hell. She unplugged one ear to mime the international sign for: rewind. 

‘I JUST WANT TO FUCKING KILL YOU!’ he screamed, one fist raised, just as someone cut the amps, so that everyone but _everyone_ in the room heard him. 

And then deafening silence. 

This place was a lot bigger than Elisabeth had realised, now that every single one of its occupants was staring at her. 

‘Oh good, yes, go on! Externalise the pain and the anger, I’m all for it. Come on now, Tom, have a go!’ she said, squaring up to him. 

Ain’t adrenaline a hoot? 

‘Sorry, I’m sorry…’ Tom said, dropping his fist back. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know what...’ 

To everyone’s relief the band started playing and Mac appeared huffing at Elisabeth’s side again. 

‘Now look, Tom…’ he started.

‘Sorry,’ Tom said, ‘I’m really sorry,’ he said again, staring at his hand as if it were an object alien to him. 

‘Elisabeth, are you OK?’ Mac said. ‘I’m sorry. Excuse him, he’s not himself.’

‘Look, it’s OK, he didn’t…’

‘Sorry,’ Tom said again. He was staring at the floor now and looking, if anything, baffled. 

‘I know, you said that already!’ she laughed, then wiped the smile off her face, remembering that "being so bloody chirpy" seemed to be the very thing that made him so angry. 

To make matters worse, people were starting to push and shove as they tried to cop a good look not at the stage, but at that girl and bloke what wanted to kill each other. She found herself pressed closer to Tom and Mac. Mac kept frantically looking from her to Tom and back, Tom kept staring down at his hands, and just then Ben, Bombshell and his girlfriend decided to join the melee. Great: just when she didn’t want a larger audience. Someone asked who was going for the next round, and to her relief Mac despatched Tom to the bar with Bombshell.

‘I’m so sorry, Elisabeth. I’m sure he meant nothing by it. Are you OK?’ he asked. 

‘Of course I’m OK!’ she said, but her tone was short, and Mac didn't buy it. ‘I’ll be fine, is he always this…?’

‘What happened?’ Ben asked. Where could he have been? The little boys room? Was that up two flights of stairs and across the street? 

‘Tom sort of screamed that he wanted to kill her,’ Mac explained.

Ben nodded as if this were perfectly normal. 

‘He did not, evidently, kill me.’ Elisabeth said.

‘Such a drama queen!’ Ben said, rolling his big grey eyes, and she couldn't be sure whether he meant Tom, or herself. 

‘He can be a little intense sometimes,’ Mac clarified. ‘You see, Elisabeth, he’s not very happy at the moment.’

‘Sure. OK. Whatever,’ she said. At this point she’d had enough attention to last her a lifetime, her voice was straining, and she was getting keen to move on. ‘Look, no one was killed, no harm done. I’m fine, OK?’

The three of them stood there a little longer and listened, waiting for the next round. 

Tom and Bombshell came back, the former looking sheepish, the latter staring straight ahead of him, and both of them trying to pretend the awkwardness wasn’t there. She was already sufficiently recovered to find it amusing. What she wasn’t finding amusing, however, were the brazen stares she was still drawing from the rest of the room. 

‘You sure you’re OK?’ Tom asked once he’d finished handing beers around. 

‘I told you, I’m fine.’

‘Sorry.’

‘Apologies accepted. Subject closed, OK?’

‘ ’you sure?’

‘Yes!’

‘ ‘you sure?’ Mac double checked.

‘YES! God, you guys are funny!’ she laughed, shaking her head. 

‘You’ll fit right in,’ said Tom. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> copyright 2021 Mel Liffragh, all rights reserved.


	4. Crêpes, Beers and one Messy Pup

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to everyone who's read this far. I realised this week that I had committed a terrible anachronism in the naming of my old smoking trader, Shifu, who is henceforth to be known as Yoda - sorry for the confusion! Also, for those readers not familiar with British slang, remember that a fag in this book will always mean a cigarette.  
> Enjoy!
> 
> copyright 2021 Mel Liffragh, all rights reserved.

Mac’s head swivelled over the back of the sofa like something out of _The Exorcist_. Ben was standing next to Elisabeth by the cooker. His eyes locked with Mac’s in mid-air. Neither said anything at first.

‘And… you would actually make this stuff?’ Ben checked in the end.

‘A-ha.’

‘You can bake?’ Mac double-checked.

‘It’s not rocket science,’ she shrugged. But then she could do the rocket science too, or at least the finance with lots of numbers, so perhaps they were right to check. She’d only offered a choice of lasagna, quiche or crepes. 

‘Elisabeth “the Baking Banker” Bennet,’ Ben mused, his face beginning to relax into a grin. Pleased though she was to see a smile on him at long last, she also understood why he was so economical with them. He looked a little mad right now. When he saw that she’d noticed he added to the crazy effect by rolling his eyes and raising his eyebrows. Ben was being funny, for her sake:

‘That’s right’, she smiled back, ‘you got yourselves a big fat baking banker of a flatmate. So what’s it gonna be?’

‘Crêpes!’ they shouted together, Ben adding a double air-punch worthy of a Champions’ League Final.

She coaxed them with ham and cheddar pancakes first, then surprised them with pancakes stuffed with goats cheese, thyme and a little honey. Ben then experimented with Marmite pancakes -unsuccessfully- before they all gorged on Nutella pancakes. 

‘Man, that was goooood!’ Mac groaned, leaning back against the sofa with his hands on his stomach, and let out a sigh of ecstasy. Ben had been grinning to himself for a while, his back against the radiator. Elisabeth sat cross-legged on the carpet, facing them and three empty plates, wondering how it was that with all her supposed skill for complex process engineering she’d failed to notice right up until she’d served dinner that this flat housed neither chairs nor a dining table.

‘What do you guys normally eat then?’ she asked, re-crossing her legs. 

‘Nothing in plastic trays, we have to have aluminium ‘cos there’s no microwave,’ Ben explained. ‘But he makes a mean bacon sarnie,’ he added, pointing at Mac. 

‘Well, I’m glad you enjoyed that,’ she said, and felt herself relax. How nice it was to be able to pig out in your own living room! She hadn’t done that in ages, not since Mike had decided the inflationary growth in his waistline was due not to his lack of exercise or excessive beer intake, but to her cooking. How nice not to be worrying about Mike… or hang on, did that thought count as worrying about Mike? She picked up the plates and walked to the sink, but she’d hardly found the brush and switched the tap on when Mac came to stand behind her.

‘Leave it, he likes washing up,’ Ben explained.

‘Fine by me!’ she said, walking away and trying her best to look like she was smiling because she was pleased not to have to wash up, which indeed she was, and not because Mac looked so silly with his plaid lumberjack shirt overlaid with a girl-size floral yellow apron. Squelch, went the matching yellow marigolds, as they somehow stretched over his big hands. She switched the kettle on and took three mugs out.

‘Thanks for dinner, Elisabeth,’ Mac said, nodding back at her.

‘No problem. It was fun! And thanks to both of you for lifting all my boxes.’

She really hadn’t expected them to. She heard Mac clear his throat while she returned to the sofa. 

‘So… you’re OK about Tom then?’ he said, keeping his eyes on the sink. 

‘Oh you’re not still worried about that, are you? It’s fine, really. You guys had nothing to do with it anyway, don’t worry.’

‘You sure?’

‘Of course! Had this woman literally just dumped him then?’

Ben nodded.

‘And was she the reason he’d moved to Oxford in the first place?’

Ben nodded again.

‘Well that would suck, yes. I mean how long had they been together?’

‘Which time?’ Mac sniggered from the sink, and Ben shot him a resentful glance:

‘Ignore him: Tom and Sara can’t function without each other. That’s that,’ he barked, as if his own honour was in question, rather than Tom’s. 

Ah, now Elisabeth understood why Ben perhaps didn’t like her much. By taking up Tom’s room she had stepped in between two best friends. Always a bad idea. Ben’s loyalty to Tom may be to her detriment, Elisabeth thought, but in the end it was to Ben’s credit. 

‘Tom certainly seems a bit dysfunctional without her’ she concluded, ‘but then if he’d left this flat and moved jobs for her...’

‘Oh, don’t worry about that. Tom’s another trustafarian, these two don’t need day-jobs,’ Ben said with another of his cheeky/mad grins, and a nod towards Mac. 

‘That’s right, leave that to the riff-raff,’ Mac said without so much as beginning to blush. Bless pancake magic: if he could joke about his trust fund perhaps he too was going to start to relax around her a bit.

‘Hmmm... but then if that’s the case, isn’t it a bit rich for Tom to hate bankers?’ she mused.

‘Is that what it was all about?’ Mac frowned as he stripped off his rubber gloves with another, wetter squelch.

‘I’m not sure it was, really. I think I just rub him the wrong way, you know, that’s all. Happens with quite a lot of people, actually.’

William Kingsley-Fitz-effing-Darcy sprang to mind again – an unpleasant thought, quickly dismissed.

***

Aptly enough at the very same moment five time zones away, Rajeev Nair, who considered Sunday afternoons to be an integral part of the working week, was busy drafting a masterpiece of corporate euphemism. It regretted in the most verbose and vehement terms Wavy’s decision “to retire to spend more time with his family after 16 hugely successful years at the helm of our London Equity Derivative Trading Desk”. Raj was delighted to announce that William Kingsley-Darcy had “accepted my offer to lead the London Equity Derivative Trading Desk going forward”. Will would “bring many years of senior level experience both on the buy side at Beaumont Capital, where he conducted global merger arbitrage strategies, and on the sell side at Goldman Sachs”. Furthermore, Will was committed “to fully progressing the desk’s electronic trading agenda in line with the new trading environment in New York”. 

Raj had not deemed it necessary to forewarn the said “London Equity Derivative Trading Desk” of their change of management, and was instead blanketing about two thirds of the bank with his announcement. Reading this on Monday morning, in between wincing at the wanton splitting of infinitives Elisabeth congratulated herself on having broken Raj’s injunction to secrecy. She had sneaked Will’s CV to Neil before she’d left on Friday night. Neil’s poker face had shown little reaction then, and showed even less on Monday as he too read the email, but she knew he appreciated having had the weekend to get used to the idea.

Will was joining in a week’s time. 

Elisabeth knew Andy had read the announcement too when she heard him bark out a self-contradictory curse rhyming with banker, and simultaneously accusing Raj of both fornication and onanism. Then he went back to swearing at his brokers while Master Yoda read the email too. He tugged at one of his long earlobes, cleared his throat and then went out for a fag, though he’d been back from his last one for all of about two minutes. As for Newbie, he read the email several times but could not make sense of it: surely even all the way out in New York Raj must know that Wavy hadn’t retired, right?

There was a second, less formal email from Raj in Elisabeth’s Inbox. This one was addressed to her only, and as usual with emails from her bosses she couldn’t help making sarcastic asides to herself as she read it. 

* * *

**From** : Rajeev Nair

 **To** : Elisabeth Bennet

 **Sent:** Sun, 18 September, 15:03

 **Re** : Great news! ( _Go on, make my day_ )

Great news about Will ( _If you say so_ ) and thanks for taking the time to talk to him ( _As if I had a choice_ ). He really enjoyed your chat ( _Yeah, right_ ) and he’s greatly looking forward to working with you ( _He is a liar, and that’s the least of his faults_ ). With both of your expertises on the desk now ( _Can you even plural expertise? I must check)_ we can start looking forward to beginning the tradePad rollout in London soon ( _All right, that’s actually exciting_ ).

With the trading off-site coming up in two weeks you’ve got just enough time to make Will familiar with your tremendous work so far ( _Thanks for buttering me up, Raj, but I wasn’t born yesterday_ ) and involve him in your presentation ( _Seriously?_ _Do I have to?_ ). I’m sure he’d love to share your slot in some way ( _WHAT!?!?_ ), but I’ll leave the details up to you two.

_(WHAT?!)_

Regards,

_(WHAT?!)_

Raj

( _Again, WHAT?!?!_ )

* * *

“Share her slot” with the bastard? OK, first of all, perhaps her mind had got dirtier since joining the desk, but to her that definitely sounded rude. For a trader and a native English speaker, Raj had quite a line of his own in awkward double-entendres. She’d have the desk in stitches if they ever got a hold of that line.

More importantly, however, Raj was expecting her to start doing joint presentations with Fitzwilliam McJerk? Seriously? Had Raj missed the memo about not sharing biros with Goldman people, let along presentation slots? Oh but wait, Raj had actually worked at Goldman too, and he was alright, well by and large he was competent, so…

‘Hey, Elisabeth,’ Neil called across the empty desk that separated them, ‘what’s your call on the open?’

‘I’m guessing this is for the beer game?’

He nodded.

The beer game consisted of “calling” –i.e. guessing- the opening and closing levels of the FTSE100 index. Neil played it daily with three or four of his young broker friends, and they all met twice a month to settle the bets: down the pub, at a pint a point. Given current levels of market volatility, this meant that hundreds of pints had to be drunk on each occasion. 

The index moved dozens of points a minute: Elisabeth could watch it “real time” here on her very own Reuters screen. There was no way any of these guys, or indeed anyone on earth, could forecast it with any reliable degree of accuracy, and that was all that _she_ knew about today’s open. 

But she had learnt this important lesson: the difference between a trader and anyone on earth, is that a trader is more than willing to bet a pint a point on it, of their own money. 

‘So? What are you calling it,’ Neil asked again, ‘what am I telling Tom?’

Tom? Tom doesn’t care for the beer game, she thought at first. Then she realised that Neil didn’t mean the crazy lovesick Tom out in Oxford, but more likely some far less fortunate young man who, not having been born into wealth, had resorted to procuring it by brokering financial transactions somewhere in Canary Wharf. 

‘Hey, _I_ ’m not telling Tom anything.’

‘You haven’t got the balls.’

‘Too right I don’t - in more ways than one.’

‘Hey, Tom!’ Neil said into his phone, ‘Our French geek’s still refusing to play, but how’s about 5960?’

How about it, yes, why not? Who cared that markets were already at an all-time high? Who cared that, much though she loved the Internet, it simply couldn’t account for everything being worth a third more than a year ago? Who cared that this “dot com” bubble, as they called it, could only go the way of all bubbles: pop! Elisabeth would have loved to claim that she was above it all, and yet even she couldn’t help hoping that markets would hold up until bonus time.

***

‘Why hel-lo, trader!’ Charlotte exclaimed at lunchtime the following Thursday, as she and Elisabeth collapsed into each other’s arms for the first time in six months. Because Charlotte earnt a livelihood making sure other people had the perfect lunch or evening experience, it could be hard to pin her down at sociable hours. So to get to spend every other Thursday having lunch with one on one with her was a privilege indeed, and one Elisabeth had sorely missed in the US.

‘Hello! My God it’s so good to see you!’

‘And you! Love the hair!’

‘Oh, that’s right, you’ve not seen it,’ Elisabeth said, pinching at a strand. It stopped less than an inch below her ear, then pinged back up when she let it go. A good twelve inches shorter than before New York, and literally a weight off her neck.

‘I love the messy bob, very on trend,’ Charlotte said. 

‘You know me, messy everything,’ Elisabeth said, who only cared for trends of the “time-series statistical analysis” kind. Charlotte, on the other hand, had once tried to explain to her the difference between a trend and a fashion. 

Elisabeth had never imagined, when they’d met on her first day at college, that a girl as cool and glamorous as Charlotte Lucas would want anything to do with her. Later she’d put it down to the iron grip of Francophilia on the English middle classes. Later still, she’d realised that really it was down to Charlotte being Charlotte, i.e. not just the life and soul of the party, but its beating heart too. 

Today Charlotte was, as ever, turned out immaculately, if a little ... fashion-forward, was what she called it. Charlotte's hair too had changed again since last winter, probably to match Rachel-from-Friend’s. It looked very nice but, to Elisabeth’s eye, too much like hard work. 

‘So how was your Saturday night? We missed you, you know!’

‘Hmm, how to put it? Interesting? Good in parts? No one died...’

‘Hey, you could have stayed in London and played mini ping pong with us.’

‘You mean with Mike, in between being trashed at Twister? Actually, _that’s_ always a laugh.’

‘For me too, Zab, for me too.’

They smiled, then took a moment to order their food and find a table. 

‘So how’s being a trader then?’ Charlotte asked.

‘I’m not a trader, please.’

‘Really? I thought traders were cool.’

‘That too. And coarse, and thick and rude and a pain in the … actually that’s not true of all of them, Neil’s nice.’

‘ _Swedish painter_ nice, or just nice?’

‘Just nice. I mean in the other sense he’s nice enough, but the thing is from here up he looks like he should be six foot tall,’ Elisabeth said, holding one hand flat a few inches above the table, ‘then he stands up and he’s about five three.’

‘Ah, you do like them tall,’ Charlotte nodded.

‘Makes his head look big, that’s all. But he’s a good guy. Smart.’

‘Did you say the new head trader was tall?’

‘Oh yes! Very tall, very handsome and very _very_ _loath_ some.’

‘I forgot, you do like them not a-holes, damn you!’

‘Impossible standards, I have.’

‘Do you know who’s tall, and not an a-hole? Mike.’

Elisabeth looked at Charlotte, and put her sandwich down with a sigh.

‘And you have a nice flat together,’ Charlotte added.

‘That’s the weird thing,’ Elisabeth said. ‘I’m not too sure why I took this flatshare, other than I needed to give Jane and my brother some space, and their twins were starting to do my head in. Oh and then Mike freaked me out with that text but… it’s kind of… I don’t know how to put it: it’s not at all nice in the conventional sense of the word there, but somehow it’s comfy.’

By “somehow”, she reflected, maybe she meant “by means of eating pancakes on the carpet of a Sunday night”.

‘Well, good!’ Charlotte said encouragingly, ‘When am I giving you a flatwarming party?’

‘Flatwarming? Charlie, the boys have lived there for years, I can’t just rock up and re-warm their flat.’

‘OK…’

Elisabeth tried to picture Charlotte standing on the manky carpet in her Diane von Furster-something dress and Jimmy Choos, got cognitive dissonance, and stopped. 

‘Sorry, Charlie. Maybe you’ll meet them at some point, if I stay.’

She sighed again, and stared at her sandwich.

‘…which I suppose I’ll have to, while I’m still paying half the mortgage on Canonbury.’ 

‘That’s very good of you, Zab.’

‘Bah, I don’t mind keeping a roof over Mike, it’s his sister I always resented subsidising.’

‘Caroline? Don’t worry, she’s only staying another couple of weeks.’

‘What?!’

Heads turned around the crammed sandwich bar. Elisabeth made a conscious effort to dial back down to what Jane and her brother would have called her “indoor voice”. The twins, Daniel especially, often had to be reminded about the difference between indoor and outdoor voices. And now the tutting around the café reminded Elisabeth too. Charlotte, bless her, outstared a few of the brasher ones:

‘So hang on,’ Elisabeth asked, ‘Caroline’s staying at the flat _again_? Since when?’

‘She came… I don’t know, late July? Whenever she was back from…’

‘Don’t tell me. Please do not tell me, I do not want to know.’

‘But…’

But? But, oh, that’s right: but you _can’t_ hate _Caroline_. Hating Caroline is like hating a puppy, and everyone knows you can’t hate a puppy. 

Imagine hating the world’s cutest puppy: well, Caroline Ronson wasn’t just puppy cute, she was thoroughbred stunning, but in a pint-sized, big-blue-eyed package. Five foot one but all legs, a mane of hair a touch blonder than her “little” brother’s, curly and sun bleached in all the right places, clear skin and that Ronson tans-nut-brown-at-the-merest-hint-of-sunshine complexion. So no, you couldn’t hate her on looks. 

Now imagine hating a cute puppy that, despite its young age, holds the doggy equivalent of the Victoria cross. There is one, by the way, it’s called the Dickin medal. Well Caroline Ronson was the youngest ever winner of the British Photography Award, for her pictures of the Rwandan genocide, which she’d dropped out of Photography College to go and snap. How could you hate that? Plus, imagine the kind of stories the puppy comes home with when it’s spent the last three months living out of the back of a Land Rover in the DRC with a bunch of male reporters and an on/off sound engineer boyfriend. Caroline was a born raconteuse, meaning she never let the truth get in the way of a good story, but if she ever felt conversation was slipping away from her she could always bring it back with something like: so I was speaking to this child soldier whose legs had just been blasted off… So no, you couldn’t hate that either. Charlotte was right, it just was not possible. 

And finally, picture that same puppy at home, behind closed doors. It’s now the worst trained puppy that’s ever pooped the earth. Oh, the mess it leaves in its wake! Well, you can’t expect a puppy to clean or wash up or even pick up its own dirty underwear from your floor, right? To even mention it would be “bourgeois”, and so what if the puppy’s been home all day while you were at work? More for you to pick up when you get back, that’s all. 

Whilst declaring itself delighted to live out of the back of a Land Rover in the jungle for three months, somehow the puppy is not happy with your couch, or with your food. It’s not enough to have to stock some poncy and eye wateringly expensive herbal tea for the puppy, they’ll still have a go at your coffee for not being ethical enough. Your bed linen is shamefully non-organic certified, it informs you whilst smoking your cigarettes. Also, the puppy _must_ sit between you and your boyfriend at all times, and if you simultaneously disappear from its view it yelps.

Literally. 

When your boyfriend leaves you alone with the puppy, it’ll sink its delightful little puppy teeth into your ankle and it won’t let go until your boyfriend comes back into the room. At which point it will go and cuddle up to him and pull its cutest puppy dog face again. And it will never, but _ever_ pay rent, to you or anyone. At best, if you’re very lucky, the puppy will eff back off to Africa for a while, or bunk off to its on-again/off-again sound engineer boyfriend’s. Or it will go and “try to forget about the wars, you know” on a beach in Goa for a month - that, it has money for. And then like some nightmare intercontinental fluffy Jokari ball it will fly back at you out of nowhere, hit you right in the face, and resume making your life hell. 

Because, as this puppy well knows, you can’t hate a puppy. 

‘Enough about puppies,’ Elisabeth said. Charlotte frowned, who was cool, but not as yet a fully trained mind reader. ‘I mean enough about Caroline,' Elisabeth said, 'How’s your wedding plans coming along? Have you got Colin the perfect morning suit yet? You found those cummerbunds to match the bridesmaids’ dresses?’

Good call: Charlotte switched to talking venues, menus, posies and swing bands, and the mood lifted for the rest of their lunch. 


	5. Utterly Po

Fitzwilliam Kingsley Darcy joined the following Monday. The Wednesday after that was the last day of the quarter, which meant an even busier day than normal on the desk. With all the clucking and the crooking of necks from this screen to that screen it felt like a chicken battery. Every so often Elisabeth looked away from her programmes and watched and listened, grateful for the empty desk which separated her from Neil, and from the real action:

‘Andy, Tony on line one, got some form in Southern Electrics!’

‘Piss off, I’m done for day! What did Nomura want?’

‘They’ll call you back!’

‘Neil! Bob Haines for you!’

‘Tell her I’ll call back.’ 

They didn’t like Bob Haines, who wore double-breasted suits and was a bit pompous, so they called him “The Queen”.

‘Neil, call Goldman – they’re bidding you 43!’

‘I’ll get back!’

‘Yo, ’you on the dog?’ someone asked, too busy for the full ‘Yo-da’.

‘No I’m chewing a brick.’

Around 11 am things settled down a fraction so Elisabeth braced herself, took a deep breath in and walked over to Will’s desk:

‘Is now a good time?’ she asked, as she’d soon learnt to do before she asked anything else from any of the traders. In the case of Will, however, there never seemed to be a good time to talk. Over the last three days she must have asked him this question well over a dozen times, always to be met with: “Not now.” 

So it was with surprise that Elisabeth heard him say:

‘For what?’ without taking his eyes off his email, where he was reading something evidently more amusing than whatever it was she wanted to discuss with him. He took his time, typing a reply to someone, pressed _Send_ and swivelled his chair back towards her: 

‘As good as any,’ he said, all traces of a smile gone from his face. ‘What’s up?’

This was, she reminded herself, extraordinary progress. She stifled a sigh and explained:

‘Well, it’s about that presentation for Raj’s trading off-site. Coming pretty soon now, shall we talk it over in the atrium?’

‘Sure.’

He picked up his new logbook and followed her through to the atrium, where they sat down by a ten-foot potted ficus. There were about a dozen of them arranged in neat arcs around the corners of the chequered marble floor. They were presumably supposed to lend this cold two-storied glass tank a more organic feel, but they failed. Whatever they planted there, the atrium’s vast proportions and see-through walls would always make Elisabeth feel like an ant in a terrarium. The white marble tabletop was cold under her hands, the neon light above bright and unforgiving. This setting was in every way perfect for an awkward meeting with someone as uncongenial as Will. 

‘Yes?’ he said, looking as straight, as sure of his place and as profoundly indifferent as the ficus.

‘OK, so you know this off-site is next week?’ she started, pushing her glasses back up her nose.

‘Where is it, by the way?’

‘Well it’s here actually, in the boardroom on the fifth floor. Off-site for New York Sydney and Tokyo, not for us. An on-site off-site, so to speak,’ she smiled, and realised she was pushing her glasses back up again, though they no longer needed it.

‘Aha,’ he muttered, un-amused. She ploughed on:

‘Have you seen the agenda?’

‘Yes.’

‘So you know I have to give this presentation in the afternoon?’

‘Yes.’

‘So you’ve spoken to Raj about it since you got here?’

‘Aha.’

Oh for goodness’s sake! She wasn’t asking him to be pleased to see her or anything, but he could have made some effort towards pretending to give a rat’s proverbial, instead of sitting back in his chair, his arms crossed in front of him, begrudgingly muttering monosyllables while looking over the line of her right shoulder. For a while she stopped talking and just stared at him, hoping he might seize the chance to say something, or maybe even just look at her, but no. She took a deep breath in and started again:

‘Raj suggested to me, last Monday, that it might be a good idea to involve you in my presentation about UK t-costs.’ 

She stopped again and waited for him to say something, hopefully something else than “aha” or “yes”. She saw him turn the corners of his mouth down, and move a pensive gaze to the scribblings on the opening pages of his notebook. 

‘Just send me your slides then,’ he said, swayed at last –and no doubt only by the mention of their common boss’s name- into stringing together a full sentence. She pushed in front of him the latest draft of her PowerPoint, fresh off the printer, and there were a few more minutes’ silence while he read it. At least it looked like he was reading, flicking each page with a loud flip of his long index and thumb. He looked up at her when he got to the end, then back down at his pad, brow knitted in that unpleasant frown of his which, now she thought of it, she hadn’t seen on him yet today. Nice though is always is to feel you’re bringing the worst out of people, she tried to keep sounding positive:

‘Why don’t you just have another look, at your leisure, and then we can discuss it when you’ve had time to think about it, OK? Oh and also, it would probably be good if I’d shown you that PnL spreadsheet by then, the one I’ve been working on with Neil. We still have a few days…’

‘No it’s alright,’ he said, and looked straight at her at last, his face weirdly expressionless. ‘This is fine,’ he nodded. It didn’t look like he meant it, but there was the beginning of an effort, which she knew to be grateful for.

‘Go on. It’s fine. It’s very nice of Raj to think of including me,’ he said. Then, conscious perhaps that now he’d made a start he might as well indulge them both with a couple more polite insincerities: ‘I don’t see what I can add, I mean this is all your work, isn’t it? I’ve been here two days, I’m not gonna start telling you how to do your job, am I? I can’t see what I could chip in, really. Just go on and present that, I’m sure it’s fine.’ 

He stopped talking, looked at her for another second, then gave her the briefest nod and most joyless smile, which she interpreted as his version of: at rest, private Bennet-dismissed!

‘Great stuff,’ he concluded without a discernible trace of enthusiasm, and then he got up and left.

She did not follow him, but took a walk to the coffee machine, staring aimlessly down at the squares of dark purple carpet under her feet while her brain started counting her steps. At 48 she bumped into one of the portfolio managers, looked up, stopped counting, joined the line for the machine and pondered what more she could have done with Will before concluding that no, she’d done her best. On her way back to her desk she dropped her slides onto his, for future reference. 

‘Tchin up ‘lisabeth! -we’rrre 27 pints ahead!’ Neil called. She smiled back, knowing he was only laying the Scotch on thick to cheer her up. She stifled yet another sigh as she slumped back into her seat and saw yet another email from Mike in her Inbox. 

She deleted it before she was tempted to read it.

***

That evening she called her brother’s house, hoping to pick the brain of her friend and now sister-in-law, Jane. But some new French au pair picked up instead, saying Jane and Vincent were both still at work. Elisabeth flash-boiled some capellini, poured the best part of a jar of pesto on top, and settled down in front of the telly with her food. 

Sod’s law made the phone ring after barely two mouthfuls. She switched the TV back off and went to get it.

‘Good evening,’ she said.

‘Evenin’, can I speak to Ben?’ she heard. 

Not Jane then, and not for her. Shame:

‘I’m afraid Ben’s not in right now, have you tried his mobile?’

‘No, why, have you seen his mobile?’

‘I don’t think so, no, sorry.’

‘Yeah, that’ll be because he hasn’t got one. 'that you then, Elisabeth?’

‘’tis I indeed, Tom, hi. And how are you doing tonight?’

‘Bloody fabulous.’

‘Still wound up, hey? Well, I guess that’s…’

‘I’m sorry, Elisabeth. You’ve got to believe me, I’m not a violent man. Boarding school tried their best to make me so, Gaelic football and everything...’

'Well, trust a French woman to succeed where the British public school system failed,' Elisabeth said, smiling at the knobbly ankle and foot across from her on Ben’s fresco. She tried to picture what kind of sadistic institution Tom could have attended as a child to explain his remarkable present character. 

‘It’s OK, honestly, Tom, we’re cool,’ she added when he didn't reply. 

‘Speak for yourself.’

‘What?’

He left a pause, then laughed a short throaty laugh and said:

‘I never considered myself cool.’

‘Have you considered picking up the bass and joining a band? I hear it’s not very difficult.’

‘Fair cop,’ he laughed again, but this time not at her expense. 

‘Hey, it’s not like I’m cool either, and I’m not even in a band.’

‘Oh, you’re cool enough.’

‘Thanks – I think?’

She couldn’t be sure, but in the silence that followed he didn’t care to reassure her. 

‘So what is it your friends call you, Elisabeth?’

‘French ones, Zabou, English ones just Zab.’

‘Zab?’

‘Zab.’

‘Well then, Zab, are you around Saturday?’

‘Probably not. I said I’d go and see my brother and the kids.’

‘You’ve got a brother with kids?’

‘Aha, yes. Two, twins. Daniel and Sophie.’

‘Right.’

Silence. The mention of the twins appeared to have killed the conversation, as indeed the twins themselves had killed so many conversations before.

‘Anyway, I’ll tell Ben you called,’ Elisabeth said.

‘Thanks.’

‘Bye,’ she hung up, looked back at her cold pasta, and chucked it into the bin. 

***

She didn’t see much of her flatmates that week. Mac was out most evenings rehearsing at a studio down the bottom of Holloway Road, and never got up before halfway through the trading day. As for Ben, when he was in he was sunk into the sofa in front of the telly, with some random sports on far too loud. By Saturday Elisabeth was growing desperate for a friendly face when Ben rolled into the living room and found her chopping apples, with a bowl of pastry dough next to her on the counter.

‘What’ you making?’ he asked in his deep bass voice, peering over as he switched the kettle on.

‘Apple tart. For dinner at my brother’s,’ she said, keeping her eye on the chopping board where, despite her best endeavours, the slices were looking anything but regular. Her neck felt stiff so she stretched her head from side to side, then carried on chopping.

‘Do you do this every weekend?’ Ben asked and she looked up, more to stretch her neck again, than to look at him. 

As soon as she did look at him, though, Ben looked down at her chopping board. 

‘Hey, I thought you were the scientist here,’ she said, ‘Evidently I don’t do this every weekend, or you’d have seen some last week.’

Ben looked back up from the board, smiled his bonny simpleton smile, and turned away to grab the kettle:

‘Do you know what you call a very clever prostitute?’ he asked behind his back. 

‘No?’

‘A fucking know-it-all,’ he said, and turned back.

‘I should be so lucky,’ she nodded, and went back to her chopping.

‘So you’re staying over tonight?’ Ben asked after watching her for a while in silence.

‘At my brother’s? Yeah I am, why?’

‘Can we use your room?’

‘ ’depends what for.’

‘Tom’s coming.’

‘That’s right, I guess he’s missing his old digs,’ she said, looking back up at Ben with one eyebrow quirked. 

He shrugged.

‘Yeah that’s fine, leave it as you find it and everything,’ she shrugged back, and got back to her chopping again, trying not to dwell on how chuffed Ben seemed to be at the idea of swapping her back for Tom, even just for one night. This was their place after all, the boys’ place. They’d granted her asylum, but full citizenship was a bit much to ask for just yet and anyway, did she want full citizenship of the Ben and Mac Republic of Arrested Development?

‘Aah, le tahwt o’pom!’ Ben said meanwhile, and this time she put her knife down to look at him. He was smiling again. At her. A cheeky, carefree smile, more Cheshire cat than simpleton grin, and almost contagious. Let’s see, this must be roughly equivalent to being granted leave to remain - perhaps even a work permit.

‘No, zi appel tarrrrte!’ she said.

‘I love a good tart.’

‘’bet you do, Ben, I bet you do,’ she said, shaking her head as she turned back to her chopping board. ‘But I’m afraid this isn’t gonna be a very pretty tart, I’m no good at pretty tarts. Not much good at pretty anythings, for that matter.’

‘I’m not proud,’ she heard him say, and looked around at him again. 

He carried on grinning at her all the time he was filling up his cafetiere, and then he carried on grinning some more. Did falling for it make her a desperate, pathetic, Saturday-morning Jenny No Mates? Not entirely, for Ben also had something she wanted, so she might as well pretend that she was buying his sudden outburst of friendliness:

‘Would you like to swap good strong black coffee for apple tart?’

‘Yes!’

‘Deal. But remember no milk, OK? Or I swear I’m putting Stilton and mayo on yours.’ 

Then again, she thought, given Ben’s fondness for baked beans he’d probably enjoy his apple tart with cinnamon, Stilton and mayo. By the end of that thought the perfect mug of coffee had materialised next to her chopping board, Ben’s head had vanished again behind the back of the sofa, and _Football Focus_ was on. Mac was still asleep upstairs and two hours later she had run out of chores. Her bathroom was clean, her laundry hung to dry over the tub, her carpet was hoovered, and two tarts were baked to a golden crisp, one for Ben and the boys, and one for dinner at Jane and Vincent’s. 

She was sitting on the lounge carpet with her back against the heater trying to read the weekend papers Ben had gone out to buy, but her eyes kept leaving the page and turning to the phone on the kitchen wall. Just over six months ago this was the time when she and Mike would go out for a late brunch, picking up those same papers on the way. Today instead of reading she kept wishing that Ben would turn the volume down, and wondering whether Mike had managed to finish stripping all those layers of paint off the Victorian plaster mouldings on the lounge ceiling in Canonbury. Each square inch had been a shoulder-wrenching nightmare, yet now she was almost longing back for it. She sat up, glanced at Ben’s frieze and then at his frozen face gawping at the TV screen. She looked out of the window at the grey retaining wall, then up at the ceiling and back to the phone with a sigh. 

She mustn’t call Mike, she must not, tempting though it was to feel wanted. 

For once. 

No, no, no. Mustn’t start thinking that way. She stood up, went to her room, grabbed her swimming things and walked up to the Archway pool. 

***

At first she didn’t feel less lonely in the water, despite the loud ambient noise and the desperate fight for Lebensraum in the two narrow lanes reserved to proper swimmers. It took her a few lengths to find someone of a similar speed to hers and slot in behind him. Then her mind returned to Mike and to the flat in Canonbury. She tried to focus on keeping up with the flapping feet in front of her, but Mike was still in her head, making the water heavy and her ribcage tight. Then halfway through her eighth lap and already breathless, she realised why it was that she couldn’t remember how busy Canonbury’s pool was at the weekend: in the old flat there was always something more urgent to do than to go swimming on a Saturday. Like the weekend queues at Ikea or stripping those stupid ceiling mouldings, for instance. Hence why Mike had to watch his waistline, hence why apple tarts and pancakes were banned from the menu. She felt her next in-breath swell freely through her chest, her brain switched off and she started counting strokes. At last. She wasn’t lonely. She wasn’t. Just alone. 

***

New mantra: not lonely, just alone, she thought as she rang Vincent and Jane’s doorbell later that day. As soon as her brother finished working his way through the Fort-Knox-like arrangement of mortice-locks, door-chains and latches on the other side of his front door then she wouldn’t even be alone any more, she’d be with family. 

‘How’s my n’ickle baby sister then?’ Vincent asked, leaning in for a kiss on both cheeks. 

‘Fine, how’s my biiiig brother?’ she replied with matching irony, adding for good measure a pinch at his expanding waist. He squashed her in a bear hug until she squeaked for mercy, and didn’t let her go until she threatened to drop her tart to the floor.

‘Oy!’ they both said, stepping back from each other. 

‘But seriously, bro, watch it, you are getting big.’

‘More of me to love,’ he said, this time without a hint of irony. 

Jane walked in from the front room, as petite and delicate as Vincent and Elisabeth were tall. A small green plastic locomotive followed after her, which she appeared not to notice as she shook her smiling head at her husband. Her glossy, light brown ponytail swished as she did so. She relieved Elisabeth of her tart and kissed her on both cheeks. 

Even in her state of heightened singleton anxiety tonight, Elisabeth couldn’t have accused the two of them of behaving like smug-marrieds. In Vincent’s case he’d been smug all his life anyway: starting with him being born first, and apparently the spitting image of his English grandfather. It had continued as Vincent spent his formative years teasing her, forever his “baby” sister, while growing taller and handsomer every day. Then he’d moved to London and walked out of college and into his job in a private wealth management firm, where if anything the recession had made him even more popular with his clients. Hence these days being married to a woman as smart, beautiful, classy and yet as down to earth as Jane Bennet-Bingley was merely the icing on the giant cake of his self-satisfaction. 

As for Jane she was, as ever, way too busy to be smug. Elisabeth watched her simultaneously balance the apple tart, smile, swivel round and bend down to catch her two and a half year old son by the hand moments before he slipped on that green toy locomotive behind her. 

She would, in Elisabeth’s opinion, have had better reasons than her husband to be smug. For starters clearly Jane must keep a third eye in the elastic band of her ponytail, since until she’d turned around Elisabeth hadn’t even noticed her nephew Daniel toddling out after his toy. It was just over six years since Elisabeth had met Jane Bingley, as she was then. They’d joined the bank the same week and endured Compliance and Anti Money Laundering training together. Two female nobodies, not long graduated, but in the six years since Jane had gone from nobody to head of a team of eight in Product Development. She even looked set to become a managing director in April, which would make her one of the youngest in the office, and only the second female one in London. Meanwhile she’d found time to meet and marry Elisabeth’s brother, and to gestate and then breastfeed not one but two premature twins. She was the sort of woman, in short, who God puts on this earth to remind all other women to stop whingeing and get on with the job.

‘Auntie Zab brought us a lovely apple tart for dessert. Say hello and thank you, children!’ Jane said as her daughter joined them in the corridor. 

‘ ‘ello and fank yooooooo!’ the children duly screamed, forgetting the “indoor voice” thing again. 

They filed into the kitchen and Elisabeth had one of those moments when she had to keep herself from wishing she’d never introduced Jane to her brother. Instead of now listening to a litany of tales from the nursery, she would have been telling Jane how she’d got another one over Will yesterday. He’d been so busy ignoring her since he’d joined, that he hadn’t twigged Raj had had her added to the _UK Trading _email list. Yesterday Will had copied the desk in on a reply to a broker calling him gay in over twenty idioms so florid and impenetrable, it had taken Elisabeth a couple of reads and a quiet word with Neil to figure out what he was on about. 

‘D’ye know, the other day…’ she started, but Sophie did that thing two-year-old twins do to adult conversations- again:

‘Mo’ apple juice please.’

‘Later, Sophie,’ Jane said, who never used the word “No” with children or bosses, ‘When you finish your green beans.’

‘They’re too haaard, Mummy,’ Sophie answered in a pathetic voice. She had her mother’s big violet eyes, and was a master of the trembling bottom-lip. 

‘They are not that hard, darling. You can do it!’

To hear Jane you’d have thought the girl was proposing to climb Everest without oxygen. Elisabeth gave up on her anecdote, and instead watched as Daniel arranged his portion of beans in decreasing order of size, parallel to each other and equally spaced, with the all the beans’ bottoms lined up in a line itself parallel to the edge of the table. Only then did he start eating them, one at a time, from the outside in. He would make a great quant when he grew up, she thought with her first spontaneous smile in far too long. Possibly since she’d penned her reply to Will’s email yesterday, in fact. 

It went something like: thank you very much, Will, my understanding of English idioms is progressing leaps and bounds, but I’m still not sure I get the one about uphill gardening. They both knew as soon as she’d pressed send that she had an audit trail against him: Raj was very particular about his traders maintaining the appearance of political correctness at all times. Just as he was particular about them leaving no evidence of accepting hospitality from brokers above a threshold of a hundred dollars a head. Probity was the one thing, he was wont to say, which once sold no broker will ever sell you back. They were supposed to remember the bank’s image at all times, to picture what their actions would look like on the front page of the papers. 

To be fair to Will, his email would certainly have amused a tabloid-reading public, at the very least. He’d read her reply and stretched to look at her over the top of Neil’s head, the first time he’d spontaneously elected to turn his eyes in her direction since joining. Then, having ascertained that she didn’t look like she was about to shop him, he had turned back to his screens again and replied, just to her, with: “Fair cop, won’t happen again.” 

It wasn’t particularly clever of her to wind him up like this. Jane would definitely not approve, and Jane was the only person Elisabeth knew and liked, who also happened to be an office politician in Will, Raj and Mr Toad’s league. Which was all very well, but if Will didn’t want her winding him up he could have started by not behaving like such an almighty stuck-up pain in…

‘Look at my drawing, Auntie!’ Sophie said, pointing at the fridge.

‘What is it, darling?’ she asked, patting Sophie’s angelic blonde hair, ‘Is it an amoeba?’

‘Not a meeba, isss a po!’

‘A poo? I’m surprised Mummy let you draw that. Or was it the au pair?’

‘Pas le poo: _la PO_!’ Sophie explained in a frustrated mix of outdoor French, outdoor English, and lesser-spotted gibberish. 

‘Hey?’

‘ _Tabby Po_!’

‘Po from the _Teletubbies_.’

‘And that’s meant to help me how?’ Elisabeth asked her brother, then to Sophie: ‘So is that what Po looks like? What does he do?’

‘She drinks pink goo.’

‘I see. Maybe she’s got indigestion,’ Elisabeth said, grabbing a wet wipe to clean apricot-flavoured yogurt from her hand, then from the only place she could have picked it up, namely Sophie’s hair. Warning: using outdoor voices while indoor eating yogurt may lead to unforeseen dispersion of said yogurt. 

‘The _Teletubbies_ are probably the country’s greatest export right now,’ Jane said with the greatest seriousness. ‘It is a good drawing she’s done, they have these... these things on their heads, and Po’s a circle.’

‘I see...’

‘Hey,’ Vincent chipped in, stirring his coq au vin over the stove. The kind of slow-stewed, aromatic dish he’d used to seduce Jane, who couldn’t cook for toffee. Typical, that their mother should have taught them both to cook “so you never end up marrying someone just so they can feed you”, only for Vincent to use his superpower to ensnare then impregnate his little sister’s friend. 

Just typical. 

‘Don’t poke fun. Those Tubbies are the only thing Daniel will stay on the potty for,’ he said, ‘Hence we all take them extremely seriously.’

‘I see,’ she said again, meaning she saw more clearly than ever that there were four of them Bennet-Bingleys in this kitchen, who all took the _Teletubbies “_ extremely seriously”, and only one of her who, well, really but really didn’t give a proverbial.

‘I drewed it for you, aunty,’ Sophie said.

‘What?’

‘I drewed it for you.’

‘Drew. You drew it for me. That’s very kind, Sophie. Are you sure?’

‘I’m sure.’

This was the problem with those Bennet-Bingleys: as soon as you started resenting them they went and gave you a drawing of a Po, or poured you a glass of Burgundy, as Vincent just did, or smiled at you, as Jane just did, or else having finally finished their green beans they started lining up everything else they found around the table, until the only possible conclusion was that you loved them even more than you envied them sometimes, though possibly still not half as much as they loved each other. 

And then you had to remind yourself that it was your choice, and not the Bennet-Bingleys’ fault, if you were currently single and hence had no one to cook stews for, or with. Unless you counted a couple of malnourished, overgrown adolescents back in a dingy basement flat in Archway. You also had to remind yourself that Mike had never shown the slightest bit of interest in your work anyway. Therefore it was extremely unlikely that right now he would have been showing any more interest in Fizwilliam Kingsley-Darcy’s misdeeds, than were the Bennet-Bingleys. Had you indeed been cooking coq au vin for him, which you wouldn’t have, because Caroline was, of course, a vegetarian. So you might as well be single, and as per her new mantra Elisabeth was not lonely anyway, for goodness’s sake, she wasn’t even alone.

***

The children asked whether they may leave the table, permission was granted, and they disappeared back to the playroom while the grown-ups cleared up after them and started setting the table again for grown up dinner. After she’d opened the cutlery drawer, but before Jane got a chance to ask her about Mike, Elisabeth asked what she thought was an innocuous question: 

‘So anyway, guys, how’s the new au pair working out?’

Jane let out an uncharacteristically deep sigh while she reached up a high shelf for some adult-size plates.

‘She’s great, isn’t she, darling?’ Vincent said, ‘The kids’ French is improving already.’

‘Well,’ Jane said, shooting him a less than loving look.

‘What’s wrong?’ asked Elisabeth. Jane set two plates down and said:

‘She’s great with the children and they love her dearly, bless her, but around the house...’

‘Why, what does she do?’

Jane paused, the last plate suspended in her hand. 

‘Mostly it’s what she _doesn’t_ do, like pick up anything but anything at all outside the playroom. She’ll do the laundry – badly but that’s another story – but it all has to be in the basket. She wouldn’t dream of checking the kids’ bedroom floor before she starts the machine. So we’re always running out of clean uniforms for them in the morning, or I’ll end up blow-drying shirts for your brother at 11 the night before one of his business trips. It’s ridiculous! So yes, I come back from work and the playroom is pristine, but I really don’t care: the playroom is the last place I want to spend my evening. Meanwhile it doesn’t seem to bother her that there’s mess everywhere else around the house.’

‘It’s not that bad,’ Vincent interrupted, his eyes fixed on the suspended plate in Jane’s hand. He had a point of course: not only was this kitchen “not that bad”, by the standards of Elisabeth’s new abode it was show-home neat. 

‘No, it’s not that bad,’ Jane said, ‘because _I_ spend _my_ time picking up as soon as _I_ get in, and then _I_ sort everything out by the time _you_ decide to get back from work!’

To anyone who didn’t know her better, Jane would have looked like she was about the smash that last plate in her hand. She put it down without a noise and said:

‘But she did make time to iron the children’s nursery sweaters: they’re 100% acrylic, Elisabeth. I just spent my afternoon queuing to buy the kids new tops, and myself a new iron. I mean, the things don’t even _need_ ironing! But I suppose she’d rather do that than take the bins out.’

‘Now, now, darling,’ Vincent said, though Elisabeth was frantically shaking her head at him over Jane’s shoulder. Fortunately Jane wasn’t looking at either of them, but staring disconsolately at their beautiful black slate floor. Wet smudges still shone around the high chairs, where she’d ran wet wipes over the debris of the children’s tea.

‘Look, if she’s crap, never mind about their French, Vince and I can take care of that, just get another of those German ones,’ Elisabeth said, her gaze skipping between Jane and Vincent, trying to look comforting to Jane, yet forbidding to her brother. Now was not the time to open his big mouth to offer anything other than sympathy. But after only three and a half years of married life and two children, he did not seem to have worked that out yet: 

‘Look, darling, the kids like her, and we don’t want to end up with another manic depressive like the last one, what was her name?’

Oh dear, there you go. 

‘Precisely!’ Jane shot back with brimming eyes, and then turned to Elisabeth. ‘Can’t even remember their name! That’s how much he’s got to do with any of it! And anyway, when would I even get the time to go and find a new one?’

‘It’s all right, I’ll do it!’ Vincent replied, the idiot. The gigantic, smug, godforsaken idiot! Jane looked up, stared at him sideways for a moment, carefully shut the door of the cupboard she’d taken the plates from, and then left the room with her head high.

‘You stupid, stupid…’ 

‘Oy! You’re supposed to be my sister, remember?’

‘I think there’s something you’re not getting here, Vincent, if I may. Jane perhaps does not make quite as astronomical a salary as you do, but she does work damn hard. And keeps everything running around here.’

Vincent tried to interrupt, but Elisabeth chucked the three knives she was still holding onto the table and raised a forbidding index finger at him:

‘Oh don’t you try and make like you’re all domesticated! You and I lived together long enough, I know exactly what you’re like. She’s borne you two very lovely children, and it looks to me like she’s pretty tired, so it wouldn’t kill you to show a little sympathy or appreciation.’

‘But I don’t see what the big deal is, really.’

‘That’s precisely the point, Vince! You don’t even see what she does, let alone thank her for it. _That’s_ what upsetting her!’ she said, stressing the words and poking her index finger at him again for extra emphasis. Perhaps the jabbing got to him eventually: he stopped looking so carefree and jolly, and pinched the bridge of his nose.

‘OK now go! Go see her,’ she said, but Vincent stayed rooted to the floor. ‘Grovel. Put it right, Jesus, and get back down here when you two are finished sulking so we’ll have some of that lovely coq au vin and drink some Nuits Saint Georges together,’ she added more gently. 

‘Sir yes, ma’am!’ he said at last, then sighed and made to leave. He turned to look back from the door, but said to the floor rather than to her:

‘I don’t know what you’re thinking right now, Zab, but this is love, you know, this is marriage. We do love each other.’

‘Je sais, Vincent, je sais. Now you tell _her_ that.’

They took a while to get back down, but when they did they were holding hands, looking conspiratorially cute, and Elisabeth knew they’d be all right. Just as well, because if these two couldn’t be happy together then there was no hope for mere mortals like her. 

The next morning, over breakfast, they apologised for their tiff, and announced that Jane was seven weeks pregnant.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> copyright 2021 Mel Liffragh, all rights reserved.


	6. Fish and Little Hats

‘Charlotte?’

‘Zab? You OK?’

‘Charlie, I’ve got to see you tonight. You just will not believe what a crap day I’ve had,’ Elisabeth seethed down her mobile phone, shaking her head at the pavement on her way to the bus stop on Moorgate.

‘All right all right, calm down, Ms Bennet! It can’t be that bad,’ came Charlotte’s cheerful voice. 

‘Oh but it is: you know my big off-site presentation? The one I categorically could not afford to mess up? The one effing Will explicitly told me was fine _-_ when he finally did deign to talk to me - and said I should go ahead with? Well you won’t believe it, he just, Jesus, I still can’t believe it, Charlie, he just basically interrupted me two slides from the end. I swear to you it was going so well, Toad even looked up from his brand new PalmPilot a couple of times, and then this evil swine Will interrupts and says my numbers are off. Can you believe it?’

‘Zab, actually the thing is…’

‘Of course he makes it sound all innocent at first, all “Elisabeth, could you perhaps have pounds mixed up for dollars?” Seriously, as if I would mix up my currencies for the effing _trading_ offsite.’

‘Well actually wasn’t there that time when…’

‘Jesus, Charlie, that was three years ago! I will never make that mistake again, OK? But if we may get back to the point, basically in front of Raj, in front of all the head traders from all our offices abroad, _and_ in front of half the UK board, the one shot I’ve ever been given at impressing any of them, Will has to go and shoot down my numbers. Said they’re off by a third. A third! What the _hell_ does he know? Oh and that’s not all, before that…’

‘Elisabeth?’

‘Before that he also slagged off my real-time PnL spreadsheet.’

‘Elisabeth, darling, I’m kind of…’

‘Said it was “unsupported”. Do you know what unsupported means?’

‘I don’t know: was it not wearing a bra?’ 

‘Ha ha.’

‘Seriously, Zab, that lingerie drawer of yours is an insult to your home country.’

‘Charlie, honey, mind if we discuss my underwear another day? Unsupported, in this case, means I’m either too lazy or too incompetent or just plain never around to help them run the spreadsheet. That’s what it means. That’s what Will insinuated, again in front of half the board and all the head traders in the world, the bastard. And it’s just so wrong! So unfair, Charlie: what happened last Thursday was nothing to do with me, you’ve got to believe me. It was everything to do with Neil deleting my mother copy off the shared drive, and stupid incompetent IT messing up their stupid incompetent overnight back up, as usual, so they couldn’t retrieve it. Tell me: how is any of this my fault?’

Charlotte was silent for a couple seconds, then she said in an uncharacteristically slow monotone:

‘I really have no idea, Elisabeth, but if you’ll let me squeeze a word in, edgeways perhaps, I’m really sorry but I can’t see you tonight.’

‘What?’

Elisabeth stopped dead on the pavement. How could Charlotte not be able to see her tonight? Granted, she was always out and about – sometimes socially, most of the time for some book launch or other. Either way Elisabeth could usually join in, and if that meant sipping free champagne and rubbing shoulders with literary types – and sometimes rubbing more than just shoulders with hot Swedish painters – then so be it. 

‘Oh come on, Charlie,’ she said, walking on again, ‘where are you off to? It doesn’t matter if it’s in stupid Battersea Power Station again. I promise I’ll pretend to be arty and everything, can’t I just tag along to whatever it is?’

‘Hardly!’ Charlotte laughed, then sighed, then sounded almost sheepish as she said:

‘I’m sorry, darling, it does sound like you’ve had a really rough day, I know how important this thing was for you, but Colin and I we’re… We’re going to church, there!’

Once again, Elisabeth stopped. Charlotte Lucas? Off to church? On a Tuesday night?

‘Did I hear this right?’ she checked.

‘You did.’

Much to her own surprise, Elisabeth found herself laughing out loud. A few men in grey suits cast her disapproving glances as she stopped dead in her tracks again: how dare she laugh _and_ interfere with their commute home?

‘Oh do tell me, Charlie, what does one wear to a _church_ evening, then?’

‘Don’t make fun, Elisabeth: it’s all for that bloody wedding prep! I’ve had to wear flats and cover my knees and if you ask me I look a right fat frump! But that bloody priest won’t let us have the bloody church unless we come to this damn thing every other week until the big day.’

‘This damn thing? Well, Charlie, I have to say that sounds like a great start to your religious enlightenment.’

‘Oh don’t you start! Look, I’m really sorry, hon, but I really gotta go now. We’re late as it is: you gonna be OK?’

‘I s’pose,’ Elisabeth sighed. ‘Cheers anyway, and good luck with organised religion.’

‘Keep your pecker up, Zab, I love you!’

***

Thus it was that on the evening of a disastrous on-site off-site Elisabeth, instead of sipping champagne with Charlotte and some literary types, found herself sipping tepid Guinness with her flatmates and a crusty bunch of Dead’n Gone’s friends, families and groupies. Today, Ben and Mac reminded her, was also the day the band was bidding farewell to London before embarking on their long-anticipated US tour. 

Long-anticipated by Dead'n Gone anyway. 

But try as she may, even after a long walk to some pub on the other side of Hampstead Heath, she was still far too angry to focus on, let alone take part in, the lively conversation bouncing around the bar. Instead she stood there, a half-drank half Guinness in hand, visualising Fitzwilliam-Kingsley-Darcy-shaped holes in the floor to ceiling windows of the 5th floor boardroom. 

She had no idea how long this might have been going on when she was startled by a hand on her shoulder:

‘Oh dear, Elisabeth, they’ve already driven you to the drink!’ said a voice behind her, and before she could turn around its identity was revealed by a chorus of greetings for Tom.

‘Oh, hey! Didn’t know you were coming. Back in London already?’

‘Came down for the night with Bombshell,’ he said, thumbing behind him. Bombshell was indeed making his way over with Ben and more beers. 

The conversation picked up again around Elisabeth, jumping from in-joke to in-joke so that while she could tell that they were speaking first of Mac’s waistline, then of the guitarist’s dual nationality, and finally about some girl who may have slept with either the guitarist or the drummer – or both? – the detail went right over the top of her head. She slipped back into her fantasy of Kingsley-Darcy-shaped holes in top floor windows.

‘Zab?’

‘Hmm?’

‘Do you need another drink?’ Tom asked or, possibly, repeated. She stared at her glass, then at Tom. 

‘Don’t think so,’ she said, raising her half-pint as evidence.

‘And are you actually enjoying this?’

‘Hmm, no. But that’s not the point, is it?’

‘Ah,’ he considered for a second. ‘What exactly is the point, then?’

He seemed in a good mood, and it struck her that a little role reversal from their last meeting might be an interesting experience: 

‘The point is that Fitzwilliam Kingsley Darcy is a liar and an evil _evil_ man. Only today, he’s had two _,_ not unsuccessful attempts at undermining me. In front of our boss too, and a whole bunch of people who had come in all the way from New York, Sydney and Tokyo for the occasion.’

Tom looked at her for a moment:

‘I know, the stuff people will travel for, these days!’ he said, rolling his eyes and shaking his head. 

Perhaps she was already a bit drunk - it had never taken much - but she found Tom’s reply and its delivery funny enough to cheer up a fraction. He smiled at her and she wondered whether this was the same guy she’d met in Oxford: same battered jeans and green-eyed smile, all new improved attitude… 

‘Vodka Tonic?’ he asked. ‘You might actually like drinking that. Even push the boat and put that pink stuff you were drinking in Oxford, what’s it?’

‘Cranberry?’

‘ ‘at’s right.’

‘It’s worth a try, but they’ll never have it here,’ she shrugged.

‘Let’s get you good and drunk!’

He sounded determined. 

‘No thanks. I think I’m happy enough,’ she said, raising her Guinness again.

‘Nope. Not nearly happy enough,’ he replied, and left for the bar.

‘You’re one to talk.’ 

***

Tom came back carrying a yellow drink:

‘Didn’t have cranberry, so I asked for grapefruit.’

‘Best alternative, thank you, most impressed,’ she nodded, more grateful for the distraction than for the actual drink.

‘You’re very welcome,’ he smiled back. 

Well well well, either he had remembered the happy pills tonight, or he was indeed making an effort. Mac too seemed to have noticed:

‘Aren’t you on best behaviour tonight, Tom?’

‘How am I doing?’ Tom asked her. 

‘So far so good,’ she sighed, saw him frown, and changed her tone: ‘You’re doing extremely well!’ she said, and indeed their combined attentions were beginning to cheer her up a little. ‘But I haven’t tried this yet,’ she added, putting down her tepid Guinness to grab the smaller glass from Tom. 

‘Cheers!’

It was very cold, a little sweet and quite bitter. It tasted nice, until it started to burn her stomach in the unpleasant way all spirits did. But hey, if that was going to make her “happy”… 

Tom was looking at her expectantly, but lost as she was in her contemplation of the drink’s journey from the cold bitterness on her tongue to the warmth in her stomach and, soon, on her cheeks, she did not notice until he asked:

‘Well?’

‘Oh, yes, I like it, thanks. Very well done.’

‘We _will_ get you good and drunk!’

‘Please don’t. After this one I’m going straight back to water.’

‘Wimp.’

‘I know,’ she shrugged, but she was already feeling pleasantly light-headed: ‘Yoda called me that too, last week.’

‘Who?’

‘Master Yoda, one of the small cap traders.’

‘You guys trade little hats?’

‘You know, Tom, that thing you just did with your hand, to mime a little hat, that’s what they do back in France to mime someone crazy.'

'Well Yoda sounds kind of crazy, trading little caps.'

' _Small_ , small caps: small companies, low capitalisation stocks. Never mind.’

He smiled, and it took her a moment to realise that as well as being a Bennet stock-phrase – her brother used it all the time too – _Never Mind_ was of course the name of Tom’s band:

‘Yeah they’re this indie band – a bit lah-di-dah if you ask me, a bit, what it is, trite?’ she added with a dismissive shake of the head but half a smile on her lips. 

‘Oy! You said you liked us, you French hypocrite!’ he smiled back, ‘Anyway say: how’s the market doing these days?’

‘Do you give a monkey’s suddenly, or are you looking to commit suicide by boredom?’

‘Thought I might try and experience the world from my father's perspective. Admiral Reilly - I've tried before but I always seem to fail dismally. So tell me: how _is_ the market?’

He asked in what must be an impression of his father, pinching his face up and holding his chin to great comic effect. 

‘Well let’s see, which market are we talking about: fish market? Meat market? Flea market?’

He left his chin alone and smiled: ‘I’ve no idea: what is it you guys trade, apart from mini-millinery?’

‘All kinds of things: we trade stocks, currencies, swaps, contracts for difference and boring old FTSE futures, it really doesn’t matter. The general principles are the same, it may as well be little hats - or fish. In fact if fish had a Reuters identifier we’d trade that too, definitely.’

‘So you’re just a very overpaid fishwife?’

‘Nope, ‘cos I don’t actually trade. What I do is I research the gaps and inefficiencies in fish-hall mechanisms, so our fishwives can out-trade the other banks' fishwives. But you do make a very good point: why is it that buying fish is a woman’s chore, but buying Vodafone somehow is man’s work? It’s all the same: you buy low, you sell high, you cajole, you haggle, you pretend you don’t really want to buy stuff when really you’re gagging for it...’

‘Hell, even I could do it.’

‘Naaa, you and I couldn’t: it’s a “relationship-based business”. And by the sound of it neither you nor I are doing terribly well at relationships at the moment.’

‘True,’ he nodded. 

She sighed. Both stopped smiling. 

‘So go on then, what’s down with Mr Great? What’s he been up to?’ Tom asked.

‘Well, the usual: writing for the _Economist_ ,’ she said finishing her drink. ‘Oh and also he sends me endless emails about meeting up again.’

Tom burst into laughter, his bony shoulders shaking up and down. 

‘Delete button,’ he said, pointing an index finger in the air, ‘It’s the one with “del” written on it.’

‘Jeez thanks, Tom, but I think I got that covered. As of today Mike’s got an auto-delete rule with his name on it.’

‘Oh you’re mean! Mean _and_ efficient. No wonder you’ve got no mates apart from us.’

‘What!’ she cried, before she realised he was having her on again and began to smile. 

‘Oh but don’t worry, you'll always have Ben and Mac. I hear they’re eating right out of your fair French hand already.’

‘They’re an easy crowd, honestly,’ Elisabeth said, but her smile was widening.

‘Will you feed me one day? What night is pancake night?’

‘Sunday.’

She was smiling fully now. 

‘I’ll be an easy crowd too, I promise.’

‘Easy? You? Ha!’ she paused. ‘But I have to admit that you seem in a considerably better mood than last time we met. No more dark thoughts about Sara, or is it just the alcohol?’

‘Definitely just the alcohol: I will always have dark thoughts about Sara,’ he beamed. 

It seemed the longer she frowned at him trying to figure out what to believe, his actual words or the smile on his face, the more amused he got. 

‘Tell you what though,’ he started again, ‘I reckon we both of us need to move on. Forget about exes and Willy Wanker Bankers, let them all go, and move on,’ he said, with a faraway look and a graceful wave of his long arm. 

‘If only.’

‘So where shall we move on to then, you and I? I say we catch some winter sun this Christmas: Hawaii? Colourful little fishes and Elisabeth "Ze Zab" Bennet in a red two-piece suit... Or would you prefer Tahiti, so you can talk French to the fish?’

‘Either would be fine. Shame only I can’t go anywhere because of Y2K.’

‘Y2K? They let bugs into fish halls now?’

‘Hey, there’s no Y2K bugs in _my_ code. But IT won’t take my word for it so it’s Y2K testing on New Year’s Eve for yours truly: yippee!’

‘OK, knock yourself out…’

‘The irony is, it’s my old research code they want me to test and honestly, were _that_ to die on the first of Jan I’m not sure even I would notice, not for a while anyway. I don't know what the fuss is about, really. Meanwhile IT doesn’t seem to care that there’s nothing to keep me from blowing up the bank once I start seriously tinkering with tradePad. Or Will blowing it up by shouting the wrong price down the phone for that matter, just for sheer evil fun.’

‘Hey, one bank down, he’d be my hero.’

She smiled on at him, thinking how easy it seemed to be for everyone these days to hate banks while loving cheap money. 

Free money, in the case of Tom’s trust.

‘I suppose you’d see it like that. But you’re right, the fishes are lovely in Hawaii.’

‘You’ve been?’

His green eyes were shining with wonder. But what was even lovelier was, that for the first time since she’d met him Elisabeth felt sure Tom wasn’t play-acting. 

‘Aha, this last May for four days.’

‘You are bloody lucky,’ he said with a serious nod. 

But Elisabeth was already far away. Her fetched fantasies of Will’s demise had been replaced by real memories of fish flitting through coral. She could almost hear the waves and smell the frangipani flowers. Better still, she remembered the feeling of freedom: one day she was single, in New York, and feeling a bit sorry for herself with Memorial Day looming. Twenty hours later she was in Hawaii, watching whales cavort from the beach, alone but not lonely.

‘You’re right, you know. I am bloody lucky. Thanks for reminding me.’

‘Anytime,’ he said, and carried on looking at her while he finished his beer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> copyright 2021 Mel Liffragh, all rights reserved.


	7. Sex(ism) in the City

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What 20,000 words already? Over 1,500 views across Fanfiction and AO3, and the tale is just beginning. At the current pace I should finish posting late January.  
> If you've enjoyed reading so far, why not leave a review or subscribe to updates? It'll bring a warm glow to my heart in these cold winter days, but it will also really help more readers discover the story.  
> Finally, from here on if I will be using end notes to explain terms that might seem obscure if you're not British/a trader.  
> Thanks for reading on, stay safe and all the best.  
> Mel
> 
> copyright 2021 Mel Liffragh, all rights reserved.

* * *

‘Was that Tom chatting you up?’ Ben asked her as they took their seats on the long awaited C11 back to Archway, along with a crew of Dead’n Gone members and roadies ready to Moonbus their way to Heathrow the next day. 

‘I don’t know,’ she shrugged, but she was intrigued. Another hypothesis in the curious case of Thomas Wickham Lorcan George Reilly. 

‘He didn’t tell me,' she said to Ben in the end, 'and I’ve not seen him chatting people up before. I have no control sample.’

‘I’ll go back to me box then!’ Ben chirped back with his simpleton grin. He was still pretty drunk, whereas she had sobered up again – they were for a brief moment about as chatty as one another. 

‘Mac, we will miss you!’ she shouted across the aisle.

‘Take good care of our Ben, will you?’ came Mac’s drunken slur. ‘You’re a gweeeat gaarl, Elisabeth! We ALL love you!’

‘Gee thanks, Mac.’

***

Thoughts flitted through Elisabeth’s mind the next morning after her “one on one” with Rajeev, but she was too cruelly sleep deprived to attempt to arrange them into any kind of order – or indeed to get on with any actual work. 

She was still so incensed about Will sabotaging her that she’d barely slept. She'd got in for 6:30am and literally had to switch the third floor lights on before gathering all the necessary evidence to prove to Raj how ill-founded Will’s accusations had been. That she had to do that, that anyone should take his word over her numbers, still made her blood boil. 

But Raj had not so much as asked to see her data. In fact, and in as much as Raj’s fondness for corporate euphemism allowed him to vindicate anyone, he had vindicated her. Straight away, no questions asked. He assured her he had already emailed yesterday’s attendees to clarify what he called the “misunderstanding”. He complimented Elisabeth on her “professionalism” in handling Will’s interruption, and then explained how the poor dear just came from a “different culture” and how he needed “time” and “support” to adjust from a “hedge-fund culture” to a more “collegial buy-side culture”. 

Now the relief, the alcohol-related dehydration and the sleep-deprivation together left Elisabeth feeling exhausted. Her third coffee of the day felt as if it were about to give her a headache rather than a boost. She thought of the dark look Will had shot her as their paths had crossed just now in the back staircase: death-stare didn’t begin to describe it. Well tough, Will. 

And also: I’m not scared. 

Trouble was, Elisabeth thought, if Willy Wanker was right now having the “collegial buy-side culture” explained to him by Raj up there in room 4.18, i.e. if, in plainer English, he was having his wrist slapped on her account, then he was unlikely to come back down any better disposed towards her. But this she couldn’t work out: what she had done to deserve any of it in the first place?

By now Elisabeth was pretty sure she could handle traders in general – enjoy them, even. Sure, like her new flat, they weren’t nice in the conventional sense of the word. They could be florid, but she didn’t mind that: her years of band practice in the male-dominated back rows of various philharmonic orchestras had left her inured to most kinds of sexual and scatological innuendo. And what she’d begun to appreciate was that, in a way, traders were a lot like the French: a little blunt, but this way you knew where you stood with them. So why was it that Will couldn’t just have a proper go at her, since clearly he had a problem, rather than wait for an offsite to take pot shots at her in front of everyone? Most likely he was just seeing her as competition for Rajeev’s attention. Not very grown up but, well, he was only a trader. 

But then if that was all, why hadn’t he just done what Heads of Research had done through the ages – certainly all the ones Elisabeth had ever worked for before? Why hadn't he nicked her slides at the last minute and given her presentation himself? She had offered for him to share the presentation slot – under duress, but she had.

And then, Elisabeth thought, crushing her empty plastic cup and throwing it into the bin under her desk, then there was Jane’s face when they’d bumped into each other this morning: her hair pulled back in a Croydon facelift of a ponytail, and yet lugging hold-sized bags under her eyes. Dan had got her up at four, and morning sickness had kept her up since. That, and more world-class backstabbing at the hand of Mr Toad: Jane had been informed last night, by way of blanket email to the whole client-facing half of the bank, that Toad was pushing back all her planned fund releases by three months, a decision he’d not seen fit to discuss with Jane herself. All so his pet Nigel's stupid useless next Structured Product got out before Christmas. 

Elisabeth was busy pondering who was more evil of Willy Wanker and Mr Toad, when the former and Rajeev got back from their meeting together. Raj went to sit at the empty workstation between Elisabeth and Neil’s desks, opened his laptop and started checking his emails. Minutes later he was off again, and Will came to stand behind Elisabeth’s chair. Right, well this was a first: what now?

‘Got a minute?’ she heard from up high.

‘Of course, what’s up?’ she replied, shooting up from her seat to stand to attention.

‘I don’t think this seating plan’s working.’

‘The seating plan? Why, what’s wrong with the seating plan?’ she asked, tucking back the hair which had escaped from behind her ear. Standing this close to Will she had to crane her neck to meet his gaze as he looked down at her. Coming on top of the previous night’s alcohol and sleep deprivation it made her feel almost dizzy, so she took a step back:

‘Look, Will, I told you, I’m really not bothered by the noise,’ she said, attempting a smile now that, from a safer distance, she could look at him almost without physical discomfort. 

‘Great, since you’re not,’ he crossed his arms and took a deep breath in: ‘I think you should come and sit between Neil and me.’

‘Right,’ she said, and unconsciously stepped back another half a foot while her mind boggled. She frowned, pinched her lips, then stopped and looked at him again. He didn’t look like he relished his proposal any more than she did, but in truth neither of them was pretending to: this must be Raj’s idea. 

It was just like him, just the kind of “suggestion” he’d make, in full knowledge of the pain he was inflicting on both parties, to foster his godforsaken “collegial buy-side culture”. For crying out loud yes, trying to wrap her exhausted brain around the idea, she could see that during busy trading days it would help sitting next to Neil, rather than two seats away. But with the best will in the world there was just no upside to sitting next to Fitzwilliam Kingsley Darcy.

‘So?’ he asked.

‘So! Uh, yes, great idea!’ she said, her voice shrill from straining to lie so blatantly.

‘Get you right in the middle of the action,’ he said through gritted teeth. He looked like he’d rather shave his re-growing head stubble with a cheese-grater. Certainly she’d rather shave his re-growing head stubble with a cheese-grater, preferably a rusty tetanus-infected one, than move to the desk next to his.

‘Sure! Yes, it would help when Neil’s struggling with the spreadsheet,’ she added, hoping against hope that she was doing a better job than he was of faking the enthusiasm. Raj now came back to the desk to pick up the PalmPilot he’d almost certainly left behind on purpose, so he’d have a reason to come back and check progress on his cunning plan.

‘Wonder what you two are plotting now!’ he lied jovially. They both turned around and flashed him their fakest most eager smiles. Raj smiled back and nodded and went off again, leaving Will and Elisabeth to settle back into their default faces: his radiating haughty indifference, hers seething impatience.

‘Right, where were we?’ he asked, raising his sternum alpha-male fashion before he re-crossed his arms.

‘This little desk here, for the moment?’

‘And so funny too,’ he said, jaw still locked. ‘Next big trade list comes down on Friday, so you need to move over Thursday night. I’ve called the helpdesk, they’ll do it right after the close. Then we can go through the trade together Friday morning, Neil you and I. All right?’

‘Right! Thursday close! Got it!’

He turned back and walked to his seat, and she let out a sigh, partly out of relief at being done with him for now, but mostly out of sheer dread. 

Moments later Sarah Atkinson came over with some papers for him, announced by the rhythmic clicking of her stilettos on the atrium’s chequered marble floor. In characteristic Atkinsonian fashion she proceeded to flick her hair about her face while leaning towards Will to her cleavage’s best advantage. Elisabeth had watched her act several times but it was still a thing of wonder, how Sarah managed to manoeuvre her boobs between a man’s face and three large screens. You could have put a million screens there, all playing that England world-cup final on a loop, her chest would still win the man’s attention, every time. 

Elisabeth saw Will turn to look at Sarah, and she also saw Neil try very hard not to move his head to stare, but peek nonetheless. Will and Sarah had a brief chat, which from where she sat Elisabeth could not overhear, and after another minute of athletic hair flicking, chest wiggling, forced laughter and eyelid batting Sarah led Will out across the atrium back towards reception, walking just far enough ahead of him to grant the best view of her pert little tight-skirted bottom, swaying ever so slightly with each of her doe-like steps. 

‘Looks like the new guv’nor’s next in line to ride the office bike,’ Master Yoda said to Andy as soon as the boss was out of earshot. 

‘She 'better like small dicks then,’ Andy said. 

Both of them were speaking to their screens, their voices relaxed, loud and clear: business as usual. 

‘Ask Newbie, ’e’ll know,’ Yoda said, dropping his aitch but raising several laughs. Thus encouraged, Andy now shouted out to the whole floor:

‘Hey, Newbie, what did Sarah think of your tiny todger?’

Elisabeth rose to her feet, roused by instinct in its rawest, most stupid and self-defeating form. Her fists were clenched and vengeful expletives were swirling around her achy head, but failing to make it past her lips. Over the top of the screens she saw Newbie blush to his ears. Andy was grinning at him, tapping his phone’s handset on his armrest as he waited to see what the new boy and girl would do. The silence was now deafening, but already Elisabeth knew she wouldn’t have the guts to break it. Her head was hurting, her cheeks burning and what could she possibly say? All calls had now stopped within a thirty feet radius of poor Newbie as he stared down at his keyboard. 

He’d gone past red, his startled face now well into beetroot territory. Andy’s puffy eyes cast Elisabeth a glance of casual defiance before he turned back to his initial victim, and rather than scream at him she just looked away, and saw Newbie look down. With more bravery than she had just shown he swivelled his chair to face Yoda and Andy: 

‘I dunno, mate. She couldn’t talk wiv’er mouf’ full, could she?’ he said, managing to contrive a loud and self-assured voice from his panic-stricken face. 

Belly laughs duly rose from around the floor. Newbie’s colour abated: in a few words he’d just gained more credibility with the guys than he ever could through any amount of profitable trading. Everyone got back to business, and Elisabeth collapsed back onto her seat. 

‘What d’ye want, you cunt?’ Andy barked into his phone. 

As Elisabeth sat back down Neil flashed her a brief but unambiguous look of warning. He needn’t have: she wasn’t going to open her gob in protest now. But she’d come close and that, of course, would have been the end of her. She knew it, and yet the visceral urge to scream would not leave her. 

Fury without an outlet: she could feel it sink into the pit of her stomach, getting so dense she thought she might be starting her very own personal black hole down there. Her head was killing her and she had to watch out not to choke on her pride as she forced that down her throat too, took a swig of her water bottle to wash it down, and thought back to that touching little speech she’d had from Raj before leaving New York. According to him, the Global Trading Team had zero tolerance for sexist racist or offensive behaviour of any kind, and she was not expected to put up with any from the boys in London. 

Ha!

She turned her eyes back to her code, in vain. She was far too furious to program now: furious with Sarah for being such a tart, with Andy and Yoda for being such pigs and bullies, even with Neil, for staying out of it. But most of all she was furious with herself, both for standing up and for backing down, and for being such a sissy. 

After all it wasn’t as if Andy hadn’t already called half a dozen people cunts today. It wasn’t as if Sarah’s tits hadn’t come up for discussion numerous times before, as had the relative merits of those of Denise van Outen, Gail Porter, Ulrika-ka-ka Johnson and, naturally, every member of the Spice Girls. As indeed had Elisabeth’s relative lack of cleavage. For goodness’ sake it wasn’t even as if she liked Sarah Atkinson. 

***

As if things weren’t bad enough already, this was also how Mike caught her in the end. She was expecting a call back from the Data Team about some umpteenth cock up she’d found in their Corporate Actions database, and she was so busy being cross with herself that she didn’t twig when an external number flashed on the screen of her desk phone, instead of the Data Team’s extension. She picked up with the usual:

‘Elisabeth Bennet.’

‘Elisabeth. At last. Hello, how are you?’

His slow baritone made her blood freeze: not now. Of all times, not now. 

‘Elisabeth, are you OK?’ 

She toyed with the idea of putting the receiver down. 

‘I am.’

‘Elisabeth, I’ve been emailing you, didn’t you…’

‘I got them,’ she said before he finished.

‘I see.’

Well, what did he see? If he’d “seen” then maybe he would have left her alone.

‘Can we talk?’ he asked.

‘Now’s not a great time, since you ask,’ she answered, scanning the space around her, panicked lest the boys should spot her panicking. 

‘I’m sorry. I won’t be long then,’ Mike said. This was just like him: ask you a question, then bulldoze over the answer, in the nicest possible way. ‘Why don’t we meet up instead? Old times’ sake, you owe me. At a better time for you, of course.’ 

She deemed this a very underwhelming proposal, and did not answer.

‘Elisabeth?’

‘Yes!’

‘When can I see you?’

‘I don’t know.’

Her pulse was rising, throbbing in her temples now and at her dry, constricted throat. What if she did have to meet up with him? She simply couldn’t. Just hearing his voice, now, made her want to creep away into a hole. She didn’t want to see him, but worse than that she didn’t want to be reminded that she’d ever wanted to see him. 

‘Look, if you’re around this weekend we could go for…’

‘I’m not, I’m busy!’ she cut in, blood pounding in her ears. ‘Away,’ she added, just in case.

‘Right. So how’s work then, all right?’

‘Yes fine, thanks,’ she grumbled. Since when did he take an interest in her job? Mike and Caroline had this in common with Tom: they had no love lost for bankers. 

‘Why don’t I come and pick you up from the office tonight then? No time like the present!’

‘Mike …’

‘See you then! I look forward to it!’

He hung up before she could say that she, for one, didn’t. 


	8. Escapism

Elisabeth spent the rest of the day glancing from the digital clock above the desk to the clock at the bottom of her screen, from the time on her phone to that on her watch and back again. She knew she wasn’t being the least bit productive but she also knew she had to stick it out until market close, which meant that Mike would almost certainly succeed in cornering her at reception. She thought of using her still very real headache as an excuse to bump off early, but in the end she waited until ten to five before packing her coat pockets. Even so, Willy Wanker raised an eyebrow at the time on the ticker tape as she walked past his desk on her way out. She ignored him and hurried away.

As soon as she stepped out of the lift doors on the ground floor she scanned the reception area and she saw him. Mike was leaning against the counter, all easy nonchalance as he chatted with one of the security guards. She froze while half a dozen other early leavers exited the lift and brushed past her towards the turnstiles. Was that a red rose in Mike’s hand? Oh, mercy! Since when did Mike believe in buying flowers?

The lift doors started to close again behind her just as Mike turned to check the crowd clearing the turnstiles. He caught her eye and her blood froze. She threw herself back into the recess of the lift doors, praying for them to re-open soon. Her heart was pounding in her chest but her brain reminded her that she was safe as long as she stayed behind the turnstiles. He didn’t have a swipe-card, OK? He couldn’t get in here. She was safe. 

Only how would she get out now? She was too proud – and far too exhausted- to contemplate heading back up to the desk and hiding there all night. The lift doors opened unexpectedly behind her and she tumbled in, smashing right into Toad’s PalmPilot.

‘I’m so sorry...’ she started, breathless with panic, as he stepped around her with a tut. 

Elisabeth leant back against the side of the lift to let the rest of the people out. 

‘Forgot something, Elisabeth?’ the last guy asked before he left. 

‘Hmm?’

She knew he was from the UNIX team, i.e. the people in charge of the really big computers she played with all day, but her brain was in no condition to recall his name. The doors were about to close on him so he pressed the <||> button. The doors re-opened with a loud ping, and Elisabeth had a Eureka moment:

‘Thank you!’ she cried, shoving him out of her way to press “B”.

She’d only been down to the basement once before, with the very same UNIX guy. He’d insisted on taking her to see the new machine he’d been configuring for the research team. She had felt neither the need nor the inclination for the visit at the time, but she’d indulged him because he was pretty generous with disk-space every time she ran out, so he deserved to be kept sweet. 

The basement held the vast secure server room that Elisabeth had then visited, the post room, print room and, more importantly, her escape route: the loading bay. Now all she had to do was remember the way there. She left the lift and half-ran down dimly lit corridors. There were no purple carpet squares down here, but instead a streaky linoleum in greyish white. It made each of Elisabeth’s nervous steps echo under the harsh neon light. She came to a dead-end right of the server room, turned back, went past it again and found the post room down the end of another long corridor. That corridor then made another three bends before stopping by the print room. She turned back, walked past the post room again and came to a t-junction. With no windows to the outside she had no idea by then which way she might be heading, so she went left and came to another dead end by some showers she didn’t even know existed.

A door burst open in front of her and she jolted back as a big white portfolio manager with a tiny black rucksack emerged, ready for his jog home. 

‘You heading for the loading bay?’ she asked, trying to keep her eyes on his face rather than on the fat hairy legs sticking out of inappropriately small running shorts.

He nodded and she followed him. Soon she saw daylight ahead and the fat portfolio manager ran off without a word. She watched him go and breathed a sigh of relief. The evening air was cool. Without thinking she started to run too, down the narrow strip of pavement skirting the back of the building. She had to lean to round the sharp corner Westward onto the main road, but by then she was no longer jogging, she was running as one runs for the last night-bus home. She ran on with all she had, her arms swinging far ahead of her as the beat of her boots on the pavement scattered oncoming commuters. She thought fleetingly how horrified Jane or Charlotte would be by such lack of decorum, and ran on faster. She followed her bus route the wrong way, figuring that even if Mike had twigged by now, he would never look for her South of here. She passed one then another bus stop, her heart beating almost as hard as her heels on the ground, her cheeks flushed red. She crossed the Thames at London Bridge, still running. Bright City lights were twinkling against darkening skies both sides of the river and that, too, was breath-taking. She ran on, away from Mike, and from Andy too. Away from Willy Wanker and Toad and from every other jerk in that office. All this hard breathing was beginning to clear her head. She could see the next bus stop over the river: she may be out of breath but she still wasn’t quite out of anger so she picked up her pace, enjoyed a final sprint, and then stopped. 

***

She slammed her front door behind her an hour later, hung her raincoat on one of the pegs in the tiny hall, and smiled at armless, body-painted Brenda. By the half-finished plate of cheese on toast on the kitchen counter she could tell Ben was home, but the lounge was empty and the TV, mercifully, off. She switched the kettle on and sunk down into the sofa, contemplating the disaster that had been her day.

‘Hello…’ she spoke into the phone, which for once had had the good grace to ring at a convenient time, just as she was rising to pick up the boiled kettle.

‘Hi.’

‘Hi ..?’

‘Hi’

(sigh) ‘Hi…’

‘Hi!’

‘OK very funny, Tom, I give up. How are you doing tonight? Apart from facetiously, that is.’

‘I never cease to admire your command of our language, Elisabeth.’

‘It’s not your language. I’m British too, remember.’

‘I said ‘our’, not ‘my’.’

‘But you meant ‘my’.’

‘I do beg your pardon, and I am bearing admirably well, under the circumstances.’

‘Good.’

‘And how are you then, apart from grumpy?’

‘Well, a bit pissed off, yes, since you ask. And knackered. Do you want to talk to Ben? I think he’s in.’

‘Well,’ he repeated, aping her intonation, then left a pause, ‘Do you want to talk to me?’

‘Technically, I’m doing that already.’

‘Cop out.’

‘Fair cop.’

‘Do you?’

‘What?’

‘Want to speak with me? Banter. Chat. Have a conversation. Might cheer me up.’

‘I thought you said you didn’t need cheering up. I thought you said you were fine.’

‘I said I was bearing admirably well under the circumstances. That’s not the same.’

‘I see. I thought you were just being flowery. My mistake. What’s wrong? Tell me, it might distract me – Schadenfreude and all that.’

‘You speak German too?’

‘Some.’

‘I see. Like you speak some French and some English?’

‘No, a lot less than that. But I do know some poems…’

‘They have poems?’

‘They have wonderful romantic poets. It’s not as ugly as you think, German, it scans really well.’

‘I’m sure you’re right. Out of curiosity: do you speak German with a French accent or an English one?’

‘I speak German with a middle-class, middle Ruhr accent if you must know. And anyway, why are we talking about my German? I thought you were going to distract me with your tales of woe. What’s up?’

‘I miss Sara.’

‘I see.’

‘Hmmm, not sure you do.’

‘Well, no, you’re right, actually. You haven’t told me much about her. Could you describe her to me?’

In her experience star-crossed lovers never needed much encouragement to go on about their beloved, but Tom was silent for a bit. 

Elisabeth crossed her legs under her on the sofa and leant back. Not ten minutes ago she was still so stressed out she still hadn't caught her breath. And now here she was, so busy trying to picture the mythical Sara that she'd forgotten not just all about Mike, but even about getting on with dinner.

‘I can’t describe Sara,' Tom said gravely. 'Sara is far too great a thing to be summed up in terms of mere hair colour and noses and eyes and limbs.'

‘I’m sure she is, Tom, but it’s a start. How many noses exactly does she have, for instance?’

‘Just the one.’

‘Excellent. What else?’

‘I told you, she’s not just...’

‘OK then, I’ll ask questions. A bit like playing _Who is it?_ Is she tall?’

‘No.’

‘Ickle?’

‘Not really. Just not tall.’

‘Blonde?’

‘ ‘ish.’

‘Natural?’

‘Yeeeess.’

‘Moustache? Glasses? Hat? Umbrella?’

‘No, no and occasionally...’

‘Oh good, we’re getting somewhere now, you’re laughing. Let’s carry on: is she…’ she paused for inspiration, still no closer in her mind to a picture of the mythical Sara. Though it was proving a great distraction from thinking about Mike, somehow Elisabeth was finding this little game irritating in its own way:

‘Is she very clever?’ she asked.

‘Not as clever as you, no.’

‘That’s OK, I am uncommonly clever,’ she replied with bravado. Where Sara was concerned all she felt was uncommonly puzzled. 

‘I know. Everyone knows you’re clever,’ Tom said, aping her again, which he did very well.

‘That’s the way I like it.’

‘Good for you then.’

‘OK, so not that clever. Oh I know! She must be beautiful. Or at least you must think so. Eye of the beholder and all that.’

‘Yes. No. I mean she’s not nearly the most beautiful woman I know.’

‘So she must be very very good at something.’

‘Yeeees,’ he laughed again.

‘Don’t tell me, don’t tell me. She’s really really good at:’

‘Go on, say it!’

‘Singing!’

‘Yes!’ he laughed again, ‘That too: how did you know?’

‘I didn’t. So what does she do?’

‘Not much. Paint. Sculpt some. Occasionally sleep with me.’

‘I see. An ‘aartiiiste’ as my dear brother calls them when he’s mocking me.’

‘Hey?’

‘Can’t blame you, Tom. I fell for that one too.’

‘Did you?’

‘Back to Sara, please. Who does she do? Is that what you’re bearing with so admirably?’

‘Bingo, and her gallery owner.’

‘Ooooh, that hurts! I can only assume he’s old and pompous and ugly and ever so much more successful than you.’

‘You put it so nicely…’

‘It’s a compliment. You’re neither old nor ugly. And only a little pompous.’

‘Thanks. I feel better already.’

‘Anytime. So we have a blondish artiste of middling height and average intelligence, who’s very good at singing, and who’s left you for a gallery owner. I gather this not the first time she’s left you?’

‘No, but we’ve never _not_ got back together.’

Elisabeth heard him sigh and paused for thought: 

‘Well, give it time?’

‘I have.’

‘I see.’ She thought again. ‘Go see her?’

‘I have.’

‘And?’

‘And we didn’t. That’s what’s not right. There’s no one I haven’t been unfaithful to with Sara, and there’s no one she hasn’t been unfaithful to with me.’

Elisabeth took a moment to process the treble negative, and to try and form some numerical estimate of how many people Tom and Sara might have messed up between the two of them. 

‘Apart from the gallery owner,’ she concluded, then thought, and added more kindly: ‘So far.’

‘I guess,’ he sighed. 

She sighed back, thinking of Tom in one of the dingy rooms in that house in Oxford, mourning his lost love, or lust, or habitual “bit on the side” or whatever Sara was to him. Yes, whatever Sara was, and she had a feeling it might not be anything that she, Elisabeth Bennet, would approve of, Tom seemed to care an awful lot about her. So much for cheering him up then:

‘I’m sorry,’ she said at last, and bit her lip.

‘What do you mean? That game was supposed to cheer _you_ up, remember? Where’s your Schadenfreude now? I was promised some Schadenfreude and some good German verse.’

‘Right!’ she said, only too glad to change subjects, ‘Listen up:

Ich weiss nicht, was soll es bedeuten, dass ich so traurig bin

Ein Maerchen aus uralten Zeiten, dass kommt mir nicht aus dem Sinn...’

‘Shit, so you weren’t kidding either. Or are you making it up?’

‘I’m not.’

‘What does it mean?’

‘I don’t know what it means …’

‘Bullshit, I knew it! Gobbledegook: doesn’t even sound German.’

‘No, it means “I don’t know what it means, that I should feel so sad. A tale from olden times, which I can’t get out of my head”.’

‘Oh I see. That’s strangely appropriate.’

‘Indeed. It’s appropriate to quite a lot, you’ll find. Easy to place in conversation. But just these few lines. They scan nicely too, don’t you think?’

‘Go again.’

She obliged, this time much more self-consciously, hence with less fluency.

‘We should make a song out of them.’

‘Sorry, but you might find Liszt beat you to it.’

‘Who?’

‘Franz Liszt? Bloke with a piano? Oh never mind.’

He laughed. 

‘Sorry, can’t seem to stop bringing up your band.’

‘So go on, what’s down with you then?’

She hesitated: 

‘Hmmm, are you sure you wouldn’t rather speak to Ben? I think I can hear him.’

‘Naaa, I’d rather speak to you, or rather you speak to me now,’ he said, as Elisabeth saw first Ben’s broad face and shoulders, then his slender body, appear through the living room door. He gave her a surprised look, until he twigged that she was talking to the phone rather than to herself. He tip-toed to the counter, picked up his cheese on toast and made to leave, still without a word.

‘Ben?’

‘Yes?’

‘Leave him alone! Speak to me! I’ll talk to him later!’ came Tom’s voice from the receiver, which she was now holding at arm’s length.

‘Do you want to use the telly or anything?’ she asked Ben with a headshake at the phone. Ben looked at her and at the handset, which was still talking at her.

‘No.’

Exit Ben, bearing cheese on toast. 

‘Has he gone?’ Tom started again.

‘Yes, and I’m back on, so no need to shout.’

‘Sorry.’

‘ ’s OK.’

‘Good. So go on, what’s bugging you? Is business down at the mini-millinery?’

‘The what?’

‘Where your colleagues trade their little hats and swaption the oil stocks and...’

‘...discuss their blow jobs from the receptionist?’ Elisabeth cut in. ‘Tom, have I ever told you about our Sarah, at the office?’

‘Don’t think so. I’d definitely have remembered, if she’s that friendly.’

‘Oh, rumour has it she gets very friendly with a lot of people,’ Elisabeth sighed.

She heard Tom blow out some smoke and was seized by a violent urge to light up too. She’d only kicked a twenty-a-day habit on the day she’d flown to New York, and experience had shown that if anything nicotine withdrawal is an excellent distraction from lovesickness. But though those days were long gone, and she nowadays considered herself a casual passive-aggressive smoker, tonight it was good that with Mac gone there was no longer any tobacco kicking about the sofa. 

‘Do they talk about blow jobs a lot then, your lot?’ Tom asked with unfeigned interest. 

‘Not just blow jobs: sex in general. I don’t know why I had to let it get to me today.’

‘Gosh, yes, I don’t know why, re-uh-lly,’ he said, switching into Royal Family English. She smiled, and he carried on back in his usual voice: ‘’cos girls love that kind of talk, right?’

‘Oh in porno movies, yes, I’m sure all the hot lesbian quant girls do.’

‘So hang on: these guys sell fish all day, and then they have blow jobs and chat about it and get paid vast sums of money? It sounds like a nice gig, are you sure I couldn’t...’

She almost laughed out loud: Tom? On the desk? It was the funniest thing she’d heard in ages:

‘OK, Tom, I told you: it’s a relationship-based business, open to alpha males and a very few alpha females only. You and I would never cut it.’

‘Speak for yourself, I’m alpha male!’

‘Oh are you now? D’ye even play rugby? Did you row for college?’

‘Does getting trampled during Gaelic football count?’

‘ ’fraid not. Golf? D’ye even run?’

‘What?’

‘See! I told you: not a chance, sorry. But didn’t you read engineering?’

‘I did.’

‘You could try for a quant.’ 

‘Doesn’t sound as much fun.’

‘You’re right. But I’m not doing it for fun, remember? Some of us actually need the money.’

He made no reply. 

‘But hey, grand scheme of things, it’s not like I'm busting cockroaches for my living either. I’m sorry I’m in such a grumps - d’ye want to talk to Ben?’

‘In a while, plenty of time. He never goes anywhere on a Wednesday.’

‘OK,’ she said, racking her brain for places to take the conversation. 

‘And you haven’t told me about Mike.’

‘That would be because I don’t want to tell you about Mike.’

‘Why not?’

‘ ‘cos I know you’ll just make fun of him, which far too easy and hence not entirely fair.’

Tom did not contradict.

‘...even though he did just practically stalk me out of the office.’

‘What? I thought you’d auto-deleted the poor sod out of your life?’

‘Well, Microsoft can only do so much. He called.’

‘You should have put the receiver down: it hangs up.’

‘Thank you! In fact I might do that right now if you don’t stop taking the piss.’

‘Don’t! You’d regret it.’

She begun to smile.

‘Sorely,’ he added, and her smile got broader.

‘Besides, hanging up the phone is a lot less effective when people call in person.’

‘What?’ he asked, and choked on his own smoke so that his chuckle ended in a racking cough. 

‘He showed up at reception, bearing a single red rose...’

Tom’s laugh rose on the other end of the line before ending in another coughing fit.

‘So I rrrrran out of zee loading bay,’ she concluded, hiding her shame, as she often did, behind a comedy French accent. Tom’s laugh went up a pitch again, and she briefly found herself joining in, but it didn’t last:

‘I shouldn’t laugh,’ she said.

‘Why ever not? I’d never heard you laugh before. You have a great laugh, Zab.’

‘Thanks. But it’s not fair to Mike, really.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because he’s a good bloke, and he didn’t deserve any of this.’

‘Sounds to me like he’s a sad stalker who did and does deserve every bit of it.’

‘I don’t mean today. I mean he didn’t deserve me deserting him in the first place. Or cheating on him.’

‘With the artist?’

‘Precisely.’

‘Though in fairness his sister was and still is a witch, and to listen to him I was an unhealthy cook who made him fat, and then of course I did this deeply objectionable job.’

‘That I can sort of...’

‘And I never listened to him.’

‘Hmmm yes, clearly. So he must have been good at something, right? Was he really good at singing?’

‘Rubbish at singing, but he was alright in the sack if that’s what you were really asking.’

‘Wow, OK.’

‘Sorry, it’s that trading desk.’ 

‘No no keep it up, I love the dirty talk. Things never gets this interesting with Ben.’

‘That’s probably healthy. But seriously, I don’t know what’s wrong with me: Mike’s a really good bloke, you know. I see my friend Jane, married to my nice-but-useless brother, and having to do everything around the house. Whereas Mike used to clean and tidy up and get on with the DIY. Fully house trained, just a nice guy, you know?’

‘Hang on, isn’t “nice” girl-speak for boring as hell? Fess up: he’s boring as hell, isn’t he?’

‘He’s not!’

Elisabeth stopped and frowned to herself as she realised that Tom might in fact have a point. In retrospect the one thing she’d enjoyed above everything else in the States, above even the endless free coffee refills and the generous size of the pancake stacks, had been making new friends. At last in New York there had been some new people in her life which, she now realised, there hadn’t been these last four years. I.e. not since moving in with Mike. 

Looking back, those years living with him had been so filled with sanding, painting and trips to Ikea that everything in their life had remained unchanged, save for their wall colours and soft furnishings. And whilst striving in vain to become Mike’s domestic goddess Elisabeth had all but forgotten who she’d been to start with. 

Yet to sit here slagging him off with Tom for a bit of fun was not fair either. It seemed needlessly bitchy, and didn’t do justice to what love had been there between them, at least to begin with. 

‘I just wish I might have been less cruel to him.’ 

‘Bullshit, I bet you enjoyed it.’

‘What?! Of course not! How can you say that?’

‘You protest too much for a start.’ 

‘Of course I do! I hate seeing him suffer, I’m a kind person!’

‘Are you?’

‘I think I am.’

‘Really?’

‘Really, I am!’

‘Can’t see it. Unless your French idea of kind is to sleep around with aartiiistes?’

‘Oh you’re the one to talk! You don’t seem to mind sleeping around with the one aartiiste anyway.’

‘Bull. Shit.’

‘What?’

‘You’re not kind, Zab. You’re tough, you’re clever, and a lot of things besides, but you’re not kind.’

‘Well you’re not exactly being kind either.’

‘Hey, never said I was!’

‘Indeed. Well let me put you through to Ben, then.’

This time she ignored his protestations and got up to go and to hand the phone over to Ben. By the time she got back to the lounge her smile had vanished again and she let out a small, weary sigh. Was it possible that Tom had a point, and that she secretly enjoyed hurting Mike? 

What did that make her? 

Nothing to be proud of, for sure. She started making dinner, but Ben re-emerged before the water was even boiling for her pasta. 

‘So you’re OK with Tom staying over, then?’ he asked while he replaced the handset onto its base on the kitchen wall.

‘What?’

‘Tom, he said he’d talked to you about coming to stay in Mac’s room Friday night.’

‘Sure, I don’t mind.’ she said with a shrug.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Glossary:  
> The _ticker tape_ is a long black rectangular display screen hung above the trading desk. It shows a scrolling display of index and stock prices on various international markets. Nowadays you could get that sort of info on your phone screen whenever and wherever you liked, but back in 1999 you'd not have found a digital ticker tape outside a trading desk.  
> For a full history see:  
> https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/tickertape.asp
> 
> copyright 2021 Mel Liffragh, all rights reserved.


	9. Smashing blind strike (or, front-running in heels)

‘Right, there’s a bug in here,’ Will said, shaking his hateful head as he wheeled his chair back away from Neil’s desk.

‘There’s NOT!’ Elisabeth cried. 

Her voice broke into an undignified shriek when the back of Will’s chair collided with her own armrest, thus crushing the overhanging middle finger of her left hand, her good writing hand. With his back to her, Will re-crossed his arms and carried on shaking his loathsome stubbly head. 

Roughly two weeks’ regrowth of the cue-ball look, it weren’t pretty. 

Sadly though, she had to agree with him on this: there must be a gremlin lurking in her spreadsheet somewhere, because this just wasn’t possible. 

Typical, the one day Will was finally getting a live demo of her spreadsheet, something had to go wrong. 

Very badly wrong: 150 grand wrong. 

She, Will and Neil were looking at a list of 100 or so stocks, worth roughly 55 million pounds, which the bank’s fund managers were looking to acquire on the back of new client money coming in. Acquiring 55 million pounds’ worth of stock using phones only would have taken the desk about three days, so instead Neil had agreed to farm the whole list out to a German broker called Rheinland Westphalia Bankengesellschaft, aka Rheinland, aka the Krauts. 

About ten minutes ago, Neil had pressed a button on something called the Portfolio Integrated Management and Monitoring System, Pimms for short when it worked, “bloody PMS” when, far more often, it didn’t. Pimms/PMS was now in the process of sending a copy of the list to Rheinland, 

With a bit of luck Rheinland would receive it by 10:23am, at which point they were contracted to sell all the shares on the list to Neil, at the prevailing market prices. Job done, all for the low one-off commission of 15 bips – less than a fifth of a percent. They called it programme trading and until Neil had access to something like tradePad it was the only way trades of this size could be executed in decent time. 

Or to put it in modern terms: programme trading was the equivalent of dumping your unwanted stuff on an eBay reseller because you haven’t got time to wrap and mail it all: your shelves still get cleared, you save time, they take a cut and everyone’s happy. 

Elisabeth’s spreadsheet had a row for each of the stocks currently on their way to Rheinland. Against the company name and identifier, it showed the stock’s price in the closing auction last night, which was the price at which the Portfolio Managers would have liked to buy. Each row also showed how many shares they were looking to buy, and then the current, real-time market price. If the price of a company they were buying went up then this was counted as a potential trading loss, and vice versa. 

This way there was a profit or loss attached to each company on the list and then at the top, a total over the whole list, which kept changing faster than your eye could follow as each company’s price moved up and down. The numbers only stopped moving if the market was closed, or once Neil entered an actual price he’d traded at, and then the profit or the loss became real. It crystallised. 

On a programme like today’s Neil would simply trade at 10:23am market prices, a time they’d picked at random to allow Rheinland enough time to receive the list, but not enough to peek at it before having to execute it. 

To that effect Elisabeth had, of course, given Neil an idiot-proof button: press it and real time prices got hard copied into the execution price column, so that the PnL was frozen -crystallised.

Each row held lots more information about each stock: price changes over the last few days, weekly high and low, how many shares had changed hands on an average day last week, that kind of thing. Though he’d asked to see this information at some point or other, the truth was Neil never really looked at it on a programme. There simply wasn’t time. 

He didn’t even usually look at the total profit or loss number too closely: with so many stocks going up and down and cancelling each other out, the total was never terribly significant. What’s ten or twenty grand on a £55 million trade? Besides, it wasn’t like either he or Rheinland could do anything about the 10:23am prices of these particular stocks. They would be what they would be, the market’s famed “invisible hand” would decide. 

Today, however, it was as if the market had a personal vendetta against Neil. Or against Will, or perhaps against Elisabeth and her throbbing smashed up finger. Starting about five minutes ago every single stock had started moving against them. The conditional formatting, which Elisabeth used to display losses as red and profits as blue, was right now washing Neil’s screen in a sea of red. The total at the top had stopped bouncing up and down, now it was more like looking at the dial on a petrol pump: the number only ever got bigger, and fast. 

Except in bold red font with a minus sign in front of it. 

They now had less than eight minutes to go before 10:23 and Will, of all things, decided to spend the first few checking Elisabeth’s formulas. Wheeling himself back in front of Neil’s desk he first re-calculated the loss on each stock while Elisabeth, sitting behind him, had to use her hurty left hand to keep the right one from slapping the back of his hateful, stubbly, presumptuous head. 

Seriously, he, checking her sums: the insult! At least he knew how to use his control keys so copying and pasting didn’t take long once he had his first stock worked out. If he’d wasted precious seconds trying to use Neil’s mouse she would likely have snatched it from him and strangled him with its cord. 

With five minutes left before 10:23 am, Will had a new total in the cell next to her overall loss, so that now it was like watching two identical petrol pumps tell you how much money you’re spending: completely pointless, but still bad news. 

‘I told you…’ Elisabeth started, but Will wouldn’t let her finish:

‘Neil, give me VOD’s prices on Bloomers, now.’

Neil wheeled himself sideways to the nearest Bloomberg terminal and the two of them started calling prices at each other. They were, of course, the exact prices displayed in the spreadsheet so no, Elisabeth hadn’t screwed her data links either but thanks for checking, Will. Honestly. What a...

‘I told you,’ Elisabeth said again, looking up to the clock on the ticker tape above them. Three minutes to go. Her total, and Will’s had just crossed £200,000. 

Bad, and still getting worse. 

In a way, at that point she would have preferred it if her spreadsheet had been wrong. Now they really were about to buy this stuff for almost a quarter of a mil more than it was worth ten minutes ago and that just didn’t make sense. To be wrong on this sort of scale, it was dizzying. 

But more to the point, statistically she knew it is just as hard to be wrong 100% of the time, as to be right 100% of the time. 

So, Elisabeth thought, mentally inserting ∧ between her hypotheses as she would have done back in maths class: if {(this really was happening) ∧ (it was no error) ∧ (it wasn’t happening randomly)} ⇒ someone or something was making it happen. 

_Oh putain_ , wait:

‘Neil!’ she cried - and Will said at the same time. 

Will shot her one of his trademark dark looks while Neil looked from one to the other. She started again with:

‘Could you please…’

‘Shush!’ Will said to her, reviving an almost irrepressible urge to slap his stupid hateful face. Seriously! To Neil he said precisely what she herself was about to say, except without the Ps and Qs:

‘Go check who’s been buying Vodafone and DataLogic.’

‘I’ll take Barclays and Glaxo - if that’s alright with you, Will,’ she chimed from behind the desk's other Bloomberg terminal. She knew what she was going to find there, but it was essential they gathered the evidence because this was serious, serious stuff. They spent the next minute and a half with Will barking company names at them, and Neil and Elisabeth shouting back “Rheinland, buying up, what next? Rheinland, buying up, next? Rheinland, buyers…”

So simple, as these things always are in the end. 

Rheinland had received the list early. Pimms must have had a clear line to their desk, for once. The Krauts weren’t supposed to look at the trade before 10:23am, gentlemen’s agreement. But clearly they had peeked, and then they’d started trading ahead of their own client. Frontrunning them, as it’s known, to the tune of, yes, very almost a quarter of a million pounds now. 

It’s cheap and easy to move a share price in your favour, provided you know exactly when you’ll be trading with someone. All morning Vodafone had been trading around 48p, making the million-odd shares Neil was buying worth about 480 grand. Between 10:19:50 and 10:22:45 Rheinland had sent a dozen or so orders into the market to buy: 10 share “clips”, at or above 53p. At that price it wasn’t difficult to find willing sellers, so those tiny trades “printed” and for those few minutes 53p became the “market” price, making Neil’s shares suddenly worth 530 grand, or £50,000 more than five minutes previous. Total cost to Rheinland: about 50 quid. 

Now Neil was contractually obliged to buy that million shares from Rheinland for £530,000, whereas Rheinland was going to have no trouble sourcing them for about £480,000 as soon as they quit their silly price fixing. In other words the Krauts would trouser £50,000 on that trade alone and of course, as a cherry on top they’d also take that tiny less than a fifth of a percent commission, or £800. 

Rinse, repeat until 10:23. 

Very very naughty. Perhaps not completely illegal, but definitely not gentlemanly and definitely frowned upon, at this very moment, by Neil, Elisabeth and Will. 

All three of them fell silent a few seconds before the strike. 

10:23am. 

Neil pressed the button Elisabeth had programmed for him and a pretty report popped up on a new sheet:
    
    
      Trading loss: £254,563.
    
    
      Total commisson: £82,500. 

Nice helping of cherries on top, then. 

Will was the first to recover the use of speech:

‘Neil, don’t send that report anywhere and Elisabeth, not a word from you!’

‘What? I wasn’t…’ she started, realised she was proving his point, and just about managed to shut back up by blowing on her throbbing finger instead.

‘Neil, give me Jens’s direct line. I’ll take this in 3.11.’ 

Off he went, while she ran to the ladies’ room and plunged her finger under the tap. With adrenaline ebbing back away from her system her finger briefly became excruciating. She kept the tap running a bit longer then walked back to her desk, still wiggling it.

***

Fifteen minutes later Will called her and Neil into the meeting room. 3.11 was the nearest to the desk, but it only had two seats. Neil nodded at her to use the last free one but Will stood up first:

‘Sorry, Elisabeth. ‘your hand all right?’ he opened, not at all in the fashion she had expected. But since there was in fact not an ounce of regret to be detected in his “sorry” she stopped wiggling her finger and prayed that he would in return refrain from blurting out such needless, insincere niceties: 

‘My hand? Yeah thanks, I’ll live,’ she said, and to everyone’s relief he turned back to Neil, and to trading matters. 

‘OK, so they know we know.’

‘And?’ Neil asked.

‘They’re blaming it on some trainee. I’m not buying it for a moment.’

‘Nice try,’ Neil agreed. ‘So they’re making us good?’

‘ ’course.’

‘Great!’ Elisabeth said. Getting the quarter million pounds back struck her as pretty important, but the guys looked at her for a second as if she were mad, then just returned to ignoring her.

‘Are we cutting their line?’ Neil asked, almost allowing himself to show some excitement. 

Cutting a line was a big deal, the only effective punishment available against naughty brokers. It was modern day ostracism, 20th century banishment, simply refusing to talk to a broker, to take their calls and hence to give them any business. One word from Will to the phone guys and the leds below Rheindland’s buttons on the dealerboards would switch off instantly. Rheinland would probably try and get through via the switchboard for a bit, on the non-secure phone lines, but Andy would be delegated to pick up and shout abuse at them until they gave up. 

That last part would be fun, but for the rest cutting a broker’s line was no laughing matter. Elisabeth’s best guess was that Rheinland stood to lose between five and ten million pounds a year directly. They’d also lose business indirectly, through word of mouth and by losing out on the other side of unwinding this desk’s trades. 

But inevitably Neil and the rest of the desk would suffer too, miss out on some deals that only Rheinland had the other side of.

‘I’ve already cut their line,’ Will said, his perma-frown deepening another notch. ‘No way can we let them get away with that.’

Where Andy would have been exulting, vituperating and smashing telephones, Will merely recrossed his arms, looking more annoyed than vindictive. This, then, was not a decision made in anger but a cool-headed call. Just because it was the right thing to do didn’t mean he’d let himself enjoy it for a second, the stiff sad old... 

‘How long for?’ Neil asked. 

‘As long as we can get on without them.’

‘We’ll be fine,’ Neil said with a confident nod, ‘What do we tell the Portfolio Managers though?’

‘Not sure. Is Toad in?’

Elisabeth turned to scan the other end of the huge open plan office.

‘Doesn’t seem to be in his office.’

‘Good! Gives us time to come up with something. For now, Neil, hang on to that report from Elisabeth’s spreadsheet and try not to get too specific. Odds are they won’t ask any questions for a while.’

‘I wouldn’t worry,’ said Elisabeth, who had sat next to the Portfolio Management team for years. ‘It’s Friday, Toad and the PMs won’t be reading emails.’

‘Never mind Toad and the PMs,’ Will interrupted. ‘That data you showed at the offsite: can it tell us how long Rheinland have been screwing us like this?’

Oh, so now Will wanted to see her data? How interesting. That same data he’d tried to insinuate was off by a third at the offsite? That one? She couldn’t help smiling, though she realised it was utterly inappropriate after what had just passed. And in Raj’s blessed “collegiate buy-side environment” too... she bit back her smile and pushed her glasses up on her nose:

‘Of course, Will. Would you like to have a look at it?’

He looked at her for a while, cocked his head in his familiar cross-armed attitude, lips pursed and brow knitted, while Elisabeth tried hard not to show how much she was savouring the moment. She had him over a barrel: there was no way clunky old Pimms could tell him how long Rheinland had been fleecing them for, so he just would have to try and be nice to her instead. 

For a change.

‘Will your data tell us?’ he asked with another helping of the death-stare. Oh, this was just the best:

‘I think it can, yes,’ she said, and had to hide her inappropriate amusement by blowing on her middle finger. 

‘Let’s go.’

Well, since he did ask so nicely…

***

‘OK, Will, if you don’t mind,’ she said once they’d sat back in front of their respective screens. ‘Can we agree on what we’re looking at before we get carried away?’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning there’s a load of rubbish in Pimms, you know. Warrant activity that shows as equities, those Tokyo funds of course, German preference shares, loads of missed corporate actions, all kinds of crap. Some time if you’re having trouble sleeping I’ll take you through the twenty odd rounds data cleaning I had to do before producing these figures I did for the off-site. All thanks to our lovely Data Team.’

Will smiled. 

For once in his sad stupid life he actually did smile. Crap timing though: Elisabeth had a serious point to make:

‘So for now will you just agree to trust my numbers, even if they don’t look exactly like those you’d pull from Pimms?’

‘Sure.’

Since Fitzwilliam Kingsley Darcy had never acquiesced so readily or unreservedly to anything Elisabeth had ever suggested before, she frowned at him while waiting for the “but”, but there wasn’t a “but”. Will almost began to smile again, then nodded at her to proceed. 

‘All right, so... let’s keep things simple, what fund do you want to look at?’

‘Your call - I don’t care.’

‘OK, just load up the AquilaStar fund since 1st of Jan and tell me what traded value you get,’ she said, still expecting to be interrupted or contradicted any second. But no: he turned back to his screens and they both clicked away in silence for a minute or so before she spoke again.

‘I’ve got a little over 253 mil,’ she said, ‘you?’

‘255.’

‘Pounds or dollars, Will?’ she asked, 'We wouldn't want to get needlessly confused over currency conversions the way we almost did at the offsite?'

‘Pounds, Smartypants,’ he replied, looking more amused than pissed off with her. How long could this last? Just how badly could she make him want these numbers?

‘Take out trades in the liquidity fund, and the warrants,’ she said pointing across at his screen.

‘253 and a half.’

‘253.4, can we call it close enough?’

‘If we must.’

To her old teammates in research she would have replied: “What’s a hundred grand between friends?” Quants routinely rounded away or ignored much larger sums. 

Since, however, Will was anything but her friend, she said:

‘Yes, we must- almost certainly pricing errors in Pimms. Now, how many of programmes did Rheinland execute over the last month, according to you?’

‘Just one, the second one.’

‘Same here. List 906785, 2nd of September, 16 mil traded for Aquila?’

‘Correct.’

‘I think we’re fine,’ she said, pointing at her screen, ‘look over here.’

He cast a suspicious grey eye first at her face, then at the column of numbers she was pointing at, then lightened up a fraction as he got to the bottom.

‘Good news. OK so, Neil,’ he said over the top of her head, ‘we’ll tell the PMs about it as a one-off, brilliantly caught. Let’s wait ‘til Monday night when we’re finished in the small caps.’

‘Sure, boss.’

‘I’m off for a run.’

You’re welcome, thought Elisabeth, and shook her head and her hand while Will disappeared under his desk to retrieve his kit bag and running shoes. But then, nothing could detract from the fact that this would make a superb story to tell Raj on their next weekly call. Quarter of a million pounds saved, Will could say whatever he wanted, in fact he could even smash all the fingers of her other hand if he liked: she was happy. She heard Master Yoda shout over at Neil:

‘Jock, Peel Hunt for you!’

‘Is that cockney rhyming for something?’ she asked over the bank of screens. 

No idea what had come over her. Adrenaline, probably. 

There was a second’s eerie silence, then Newbie chortled, followed by Master Yoda and Andy rising up from their chairs just enough to ascertain that only Elisabeth could have spoken. Will re-emerged from under his desk, smiling for the second time in under five minutes, surely a world first. 

He slapped Elisabeth on the shoulder on his way out and said:

‘You’re catching on, Lizzie, you’re catching on…’

Lizzie?!???

***

That evening she stepped down to her front door to find Tom sat under the stairs, reading _Moby Dick_. What with all the day’s excitement she’d forgotten he’d be back in town.

‘Hi there! Back already? Lost your keys?’ she said twirling his old ones on her right middle finger- the left was still way too sore. 

Tom jumped up to his feet, deftly dodging the stairs above his head. He stood between her and the door and kissed her on both cheeks. He’d cut his hair back a bit, but he’d left a boyish mop on top, and what with the wide grin and the general energy around him tonight it was all rather… Elisabeth looked at him for a while trying to think what it was, and he straight back at her with his bright green stare, until she eventually prised her eyes off him, and got on with opening the door. 

‘So remind me again why you moved out of here in the first place?’ she asked as he dumped a small canvas rucksack behind the sofa.

‘It was a mistake!’ he said with a happy shrug. ‘A great, and fantastic mistake,’ he added smiling more broadly still. 

‘Well, glad you’re proud of it,’ said Elisabeth, and poured herself a glass of water from the tap. She did feel a little thirsty, but mostly she was just after an excuse to look away from Tom’s smile. 

‘Look, for a start, I wouldn’t have met you, right?’ he said while her back was turned. 

‘Oh my god you’re right! You have escaped a fate worse than death! Lucky you, yay!’ she cried, and turned back around when she heard him start to laugh. She must have caught him on a good night.

‘But other than that?’ she asked. 

‘Not much: Oxford’s rubbish. Sara’s ditched me for good, I hate the Bombsite.’

‘The Bombsite?’

‘The house... Bombshell’s house.’

‘Right,’ she frowned, puzzled, ‘So what are you so chuffed about then?’

‘I’m chuffed because I needed a change, and I’ve had one, and I’ve decided that new is the new new for me. New Millennium coming up. I’m going to get a new job, a new place, a new everything,’ he explained with emphatic hand gestures. 

She noticed that, like her, he had very long arms. But unlike her he knew how to use them to great dramatic effect, rather than just to knock random objects off the corners of shelves and tables. 

He’d taken off his black reefer jacket and was wearing the same dark green sweater he’d had in Oxford. Part of her couldn’t help wondering whether he was also wearing the same t-shirt, and she had to make a conscious effort to recall her mind away from his sweaty torso, as she still remembered it from that day, and back to the present:

‘Fabulous. Now you know what, I’d stay here and banter all night about your nearly-new year resolutions, but I’d like to take this banker’s costume off, and have a shower and make some dinner.’

‘Can I watch?’

‘You can watch me make dinner, yes.’

***

‘So I take it you’d like something to eat?’ she asked when she got back to the lounge and opened the fridge.

‘You making apple tart?’ he asked, turning around to flash her another cheeky grin over the back of the sofa.

‘No, I’m afraid that’s strictly a weekend treat only. Tonight for a change I’m having pasta. With bacon and…’ she rummaged through the bottom shelf, ‘…spinach.’ 

She got everything out and turned back to look at him:

‘And forr instant addid Frrrenchness, sourrrr crrrim and black pepperrr?’ 

‘Oh, so that’s how you add instant Frenchness?’

‘Pretty much,’ she said, thought about it, pouted, then pinched the air with her left index and thumb: ‘And a little nutmeg, actually.’

‘You know that’s got hallucinogenic properties?’

‘I didn’t, but clearly you would.’

‘Yes please, anyway. Let’s get high!’

‘Don’t bet on it.’

She started wilting the spinach straight in the frying pan with the cream and bacon, while boiling water for the pasta on the next ring. In the absence of a mortar and pestle she then gave three peppercorns a hearty whack on the worktop with the bottom of Ben’s jar of Marmite, which made Tom jump and, momentarily, stop smiling at her so distractingly. It was all ready about ten minutes later, and she served out two large plates which he came over to pick up. They sat down at the foot of the sofa amidst a dense constellation of coffee mug rings and, for a while, they just ate in silence.

‘This is really nice,’ he said halfway through his plate.

‘Thanks.’ 

‘So you coming out tonight?’

‘Where?’

‘Pub.’

‘Sorry I can’t, big day tomorrow.’

‘Can’t be: tomorrow’s Saturday.’

‘Swim, shop, clean, laundry, brother’s kids,’ she started to enumerate on her fingers.

‘You’re laundering his kids, are they that bad?’

‘No I’m just babysitting them but yes, of course they’re a complete pain. Cute, but a pain. And they’re having more.’

‘See, that sounds to me like you need a drink.’

‘No, it sounds to me like you need a drink, and I need a good night’s sleep.’

‘Oh come on, surely you need a drink. Drown your sorrows with us?’

‘I haven’t got any sorrows!’

‘Haven’t you?’

‘Nooo, moving on and catching on, onward and upward and all that! I made a quarter of a million pounds today. Well got it back, anyway: I’m feeling quite chuffed with myself, thank you very much,’ she said, patting herself on the shoulder. 

‘Ouch!’ she added, having forgotten about her hurty finger.

‘Anyway, out of your quarter million can I have five grand? It’ll be nothing to you.’

‘Don’t be greedy. Some of us haven’t got a trust fund, remember? And anyway the bank made that, or actually its clients so yes, you’re probably already five grand richer, and all thanks to me!’

‘In which case I categorically must buy you a drink.’

‘Another time, Tom, by all means,’ she smiled. 

This day was getting better by the minute, and she was beginning to feel more than a little pleased with herself when Tom started again in a darker tone: 

‘FYI what we own is a bunch of villages in Galway and Wiltshire: land houses and sheep, nothing your lot could trade.’

‘Sorry, point taken,’ she said, and looked down at her plate. In truth the only point she’d registered was not to bring up the trust fund again. Clearly money that old was no laughing matter. 

‘But you should come and visit sometime,’ Tom added, changing his tone all over again. 

She liked this one better, undeniably, only she wished she could trust him to keep it up. So before she spoke again she made sure she sounded less lightheaded than she felt: 

‘That sounds very nice, Tom, perhaps in the summer. Tonight I’m definitely going to read and have an early night, if you don’t mind. How are you finding _Moby Dick_?’

‘Have you read it?’

‘When I was in Hawaii. It’s full of whales there. Swarming with them, sometimes, spectacular. Are you enjoying it?’

‘A whale is a spouting fish with a horizontal tail...’ Tom quoted, ‘It’s a strange book, isn’t it?’

‘It is. Have you got to the bit where they’re boiling the blubber?’

‘Don’t think so.’

‘It’s the best part. Truly infernal. Interesting bit of engineering history too.’

‘I look forward to it. Shall we discuss this on our way to the pub?’

‘No thanks. I told you: early night.’

But I’d love it if you were to carry on begging, she thought as she heard Ben come in. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Glossary:  
>  _Pimms_ is a summer cocktail popular in the UK, especially with spectators at tennis, cricket and polo games.   
>   
> _Dealerboards_ are the phones used by the traders. Instead of a dialling pad dealer boards have one button per "line" to each broker. The numbers are pre-programmed and the lines can be shared, so multiple traders can "conference call" to the same broker by "clicking" in and out of the line. Again, it's the sort of technology a modern mobile phone could nowadays just about support. However, unlike with a mobile phone each line is secure, and recorded for audit purposes.
> 
> copyright 2021 Mel Liffragh, all rights reserved.


	10. It's Complicated

By mid-October Elisabeth was beginning to get used to being called Lizzie. She hated it, but she knew that to be given a nickname, any nickname, was an accolade. No one got anywhere in trading under their real name and even Andy, as it turned out, was known to his wife as Kevin. Will was either Boss or The New Guv’nor -and New he would remain until he retired or, hopefully, got sacked- while Neil had only graduated from Newbie to the equally offensive Jock since the even newer Newbie, from Essex, had started. 

Hence Elisabeth counted her blessings to have ended up with something neither sexist nor Frenchist - just impossible to live up to. 

She’d also grown used to dodging Mike’s calls to her office line, to boiling pasta for two most evenings, and to using an extra egg for Sunday night pancakes: it turned out Tom’s appetite for them was even bigger than Mac’s. But just as things were beginning to settle down for her Mike cornered her, one Friday evening as she walked out of the building with Neil. There was no warning this time, so she was well past the turnstiles when he greeted her with a cheerful:

‘Hi, darling! Thought I’d surprise you!’ 

Surprised she was, indeed. Not in a good way. 

‘Mike, this is Neil, one of the traders I’ve been working with since I got back. Neil, this is Mike.’

She said this confidently enough, though only to fill the silence. The two guys took each other in, exchanged pleased-to-meet-you’s and then, to her utter dismay, Neil said he’d better get on, wished her a good weekend, and left through the revolving doors. 

‘Where shall we go?’ Mike asked. ‘How about some early dinner?’ 

Now that struck her as a very bad idea. She stared at him for a few seconds while she tried to think of an escape route. Objectively, Mike hadn’t changed: he still was in every possible way a good, solid guy. His features were beyond reproach in a Viking sort of way: tall, broad, strong armed and strong handed, with vigorous dirty blond hair jutting out above his determined forehead, light blue eyes and the kind of creamy skin that tans brown at the mere hint of sunshine. 

But today, with just a foot of physical space between them but at a distance of seven months, what she saw was the quantity of gel holding his hair in place, the open pores around his slightly thick nose, his full lips’ tendency to droop a little on one side, and the sensible man-made fabric of his work suit. 

‘Uh, you know what, I had a late lunch,’ she muttered, despite having skipped lunch altogether to make yoga at the gym. ‘It’s a bit early to eat anyway, isn’t it? Let’s just go for coffee or something.’

She started yomping out of the courtyard, hoping that she’d be able to avoid talking to him as long as she kept walking fast. But she felt him pull her right arm as soon as they got onto the pavement.

‘Mike, let go!’

‘Elisabeth, what’s going on?’ he asked, still holding on to her arm.

‘Let go.' 

'Please,’ she added, trying to shake herself free. 

He complied with a dramatic sigh, and used his free hand to push up his small wire-rimmed glasses. Oh dear, that normally announced a sermon, and tonight was no exception:

‘Why are you being like this? You’re just rude to me, and where were you when I came to pick you up last time?’

Elisabeth’s skin crept. Here was another thing which hadn’t changed about Mike: when he got angry he did not shout or swear as the traders did, he just started talking to her as if she were a naughty five year old. Sadly in that respect Elisabeth would probably never change either: that tone of voice still whipped her into a right fury. 

A fury of the ancient, mythical kind. A fury on a really bad snake-hair day, hellbent on unleashing chaos: 

‘What last time?’ she lied. 

‘Why are you being like this? Why are you ignoring me? You’ve not so much as asked me how I am,’ he said with a long-suffering expression that was all too familiar. She tried for a deep breath in, and drew instead a shallow, exasperated one:

‘How are you,’ she said, making a petulant point of not sounding like she was using a question mark. 

‘I’m OK, thanks.’

She didn’t move, or speak. She just glowered on – very much _à la_ Kingsley-Darcy, come to think of it. 

‘I miss you, Elisabeth.’

‘Oh,’ she nodded, raised her eyebrows, chewed her lip and stared down at his shoes. 

Same old pair of black Church’s, she noticed. A bit more creased, he should get a new pair. Noticing these kind of things had always been her job in their relationship: Mike prided himself on his lack of sartorial vanity, and disapproved of spending a penny more than necessary on personal attire.

‘Is that all you can say?’ he asked. 

He was finally sounding borderline angry. Though less annoying than his lecturing tone, it was also scarier. 

‘Mike I, hmmm…’ she looked up at him, took a deep breath, and said: ‘Look, what is it you want from me?’

She thought that in saying this, rather than “Please go away,” she was making a huge effort, but Mike disagreed:

‘Is it too much to ask for a bit of honesty? A bit of common decency and truth, a bit of an effort, for Christ’s sake?’

‘Hang on, what effort is it I’m not making? You’ve got the flat, haven’t you? All I asked for was a bit of head space, so please give me that at least, OK?’

‘But I didn’t think it would be forever,’ he said, and his bottom lip began to tremble. 

She stared on at him but, to her great relief, she found that she did not give in to her old ways. Not only did she not pity him, she felt bold enough to bring up the touchiest of subjects:

‘Well, I hear dear Caroline has all but moved into my side of the wardrobe anyway. I would have thought you two would be over the moon with me staying away.’

She’d tried for faux-innocence, but it turned out that even after seven months she was still unable to mention his sister without the most abject bitterness. Mike immediately picked up on it and perked up, and resumed his patient, patronising, infuriating tone :

‘Elisabeth, I don’t know what Charlotte’s been telling you, but Caroline is only staying for a few weeks. Just until she goes off on her next trip.’

Tempting though it was to start an umpteenth argument about that blasted puppy, Elisabeth made a herculean effort to focus on Mike instead: 

‘Look, I’m sorry if I haven’t been clear before: I’m not coming back. I’m sorry if you’re not happy about it but I think it’s the right thing to do. For both of us. I’m not coming back.’

She felt like such an ass stood there on the pavement with him. Dusk was coming, and with it a windy drizzle. It was absurd. He looked up at the rain, as if surprised by its arrival, then down, and pulled up the collar of his raincoat, still without looking at her. She could see his chest heaving as he stared at the speckles of water forming on the square concrete paving slabs underneath their feet. 

‘Elisabeth?’ he asked, still staring at the pavement. 

‘Yes?’

‘Elisabeth, couldn’t we try again?’ Mike said, looking up, ‘At least try? I know things weren’t right towards the end, but we can change! I have changed, I really have,’ he said, but with a vehemence which belied every word, ‘I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and I swear I will show you that...’

Elisabeth’s eyes widened, and panic set in. She had to get away, she just had to. She shut her eyes and a Hawaiian beach flashed under her eyelids, while Mike went on and on about bright new beginnings. She opened her eyes again:

‘Mike, we’ve got to move on,’ she said, cutting him mid-flow, and making sure she spoke slowly and clearly while looking him straight in the eye. He would of course have called it rude, but she knew of no other way to fit a word in when he went on like that. And indeed he shut up long enough for her to hope he might have taken the hint, but no:

‘I hear you, Elisabeth. And I agree! The old Elisabeth and Mike is no more, we must move on from that. But that does not mean that we have to move on separate paths!’ 

He joined his palms together to underline the subtle point about paths merging together. 

‘Mike, look, I really don’t think that’s a good idea, I...’ 

‘Elisabeth, you feel this way now: you’ve been away a long time. But I know you, and I know that you will change your mind, that I can make you change your mind. I have changed, you will see, I will show you, and then…’

‘Mike, stop it! STOP!’ she shouted until he did, finally, stop. ‘I’m not coming back, OK? I am moving on, and you should do the same.’

He gaped at her for a few seconds more, before looking down at the rain-splattered pavement again. 

‘Are you sure? Is that final?’

‘Yes, yes it is. We can sort out the mortgage whenever you’re ready, no hurry.’

She saw his jaw tense up: this, then, was the end. The end for him anyway. For her it had been over for a while. Her final act of charity, or so she thought, was to give him a few minutes to get used to the idea, though they were both getting increasingly wet. 

‘OK, OK then,’ he said, looking back up. ‘But answer me this and then I’ll leave you alone, I promise.’

That sounded like a much more attractive proposition, if somewhat over-dramatically phrased. He was looking at a point about two inches to the side of her head now, blinking furiously as you do when the lenses of your glasses get too wet to see. She took her own glasses off and watched a rivulet of water run down the side of his cheek - not a tear, just rain, lots of it. 

Just as she might have started to feel sorry for him he said:

‘Is there someone else?’

The hackneyed phrase. The sad, bad, vaudeville cliché. To go out with someone for seven years, live with them for four, and end up like this. In a drizzle thick with spite and sleazy suspicion. He’d always been expert at piling the guilt on her, at being the victim. Over the tense last few months of their relationship he’d openly suspected her of sleeping with just about everyone in her team. He’d even asked her about Toad once, when he must have felt particularly sorry for himself.

OK, so he wanted to play that little game once more, for old times’ sake? But of course, by all means. If that meant he’d really leave her alone, then it had to be worth a shot.

‘Yes, actually. Yes there is,’ she said, crossed her arms, and had another vision of the beach in Lahaina. This time she was walking out to sea, wearing a red two-piece suit and carrying a snorkel. This was not something she’d ever done in real life, she realised even as she pictured it, else she would have sunburnt after about ten minutes in the water, and come back out the colour of the two-piece suit itself. But in theory it was a really nice thought.

Meanwhile Mike swayed back, stunned, then nodded at her shoes and eventually, agonizingly slowly, he took his useless glasses off and looked back at her. 

‘I see.’

Really, and what did he see? There was no way he could see, because she was lying through her teeth. But it was a convenient exit route, and for once in her life she felt no compunction at being dishonest, despite the pain she could read in his eyes through all that heavenly water.

The pain she was knowingly putting there. 

‘Is it that guy I just saw?’

She frowned: it took her a moment to catch who he meant.

‘Neil? No, it’s not him.’

‘Do I know him? Is it that Greek guy from your old team?’ he asked again, in a trembling voice and matching hang-dog look. 

‘What?! No! Leave Kostas alone!’

‘Sorry.’

‘Save yourself the trouble, Mike, you don’t know him.’ 

This was good. Good and easy. Spite was finally making it easy. No more pity, no hesitation, just pure Elisabethan ruthlessness, and almost certainly nothing but relief and jubilation tomorrow if she could but put an end to it tonight, and make him stay away for good. His pale blue eyes widened as he saw that she was not moved, that this time she was not faltering. He looked down, then back up again: 

‘What’s his name? I won’t ask anymore, I swear. I’ll go, just tell me his name, so I can put a name to it, in my head.’

She let her arms unfold, hooked her thumbs in her coat pockets and felt, in the right one, her old copy of Moby Dick. She’d dug it out, still bulging with sand and sun-cream stains, a few days after Tom had moved in. She took a deep breath in, raised her chest, tilted her head to the right, and looked Mike in the eye.

‘Tom: his full name is Thomas Wickham Lorcan George Reilly. So now you know, good bye, Mike.’

xxx

Her phone rang not ten minutes later. Charlotte of course. 

She rang three times, but Elisabeth did not feel up to talking to her. Will had been a pain in the backside all day, refusing to see why she “couldn’t just” now make her fabulous spreadsheet work for the whole of Europe overnight, or alternatively why she “couldn’t just” have tradePad plugged in to the maze of Pimms' databases and the myriad of the bank's brokers, all ready to use by the end of next week. She tried to explain to him that this job had taken two über-geeks three months in New York but the lad simply had no patience. Well, he was only a trader. 

At least since the Rheinland incident Will had started looking her in the eye when they were arguing, which was progress of a kind. Still, Elisabeth felt she’d had enough bickering in one day to last her a lifetime, and she didn’t need Charlotte to give her a hard time too, however right she would be to feel sorry for Mike.

Back at the flat Elisabeth found the boys sat at either end of the sofa, picking at their guitars and giggling like a pair of girls. Such levity in Ben was rare enough to make Elisabeth hold back before she entered the lounge. She watched them play for a short while, as she'd often watched the twins play. I.e. very much as an outsider, albeit a benevolent one. Keen not to ruin their happy mood with her own less cheerful one, she attempted a quick exit but Tom stopped to look up at her as she passed the sofa. 

‘Hey, guys,’ she said, her hand on the handle of the door to the corridor. 

‘Hello, Elisabeth!’ they replied, looked at each other, giggled again, and went back to playing some strange riff, ending in an interrogative twang, then looked up at her again and burst out laughing. She opened the door to go and get changed.

‘OK, OK, listen:’ Tom started when she got back in. ‘I think we’ve got an ode to your pancakes.’

‘You do?’

They certainly seemed to enjoy eating them on a Sunday night, and sometimes on a Wednesday night too. Now they sang along to their absurd little riff, an air that started “Zab-a-zab zab, flip’em flat. Stack’em high and make them sweet,”, carried on in the same silly alliterative vein for two verses, then stopped as abruptly as it had started, though not without having put a smile back on her face.

‘What do you think?’

A bit like the fresco on the wall: she found it endearing, if perhaps not strictly speaking “good”. 

‘Don’t give up the day job yet – oh silly me, you don’t have one!’

‘I’ll have you know I’m starting one on Monday, actually,’ Tom retorted, and played a few desultory notes.

‘Really? You won’t know what’s hit you.’

He shrugged.

‘And when is it you’re moving out to sunny Finsbury Park again?’ she asked.

‘Sunday why, are you that keen to see the back of me?’

‘Don’t be silly.’

‘I can still come and stay though, right?’ he said, looking at her only.

‘Hmmm, not sure!’ she said, and looked away at Ben, whose smile had vanished. ‘Perhaps, in the interest of musical history-making, I’ll take it upon myself to bear with it as best I can.’

‘I’ll miss you!’ Tom said, grinning. 

Typical: ostentatiously meaning both of them, and privately shooting her that look, the little flirt. And the worst part was, she could not help but smile back at him, though she knew full well how much Ben hated being witness to this sort of behaviour. 

‘Right, aren’t you two supposed to be going out? Come on, clear out!’ she shooed them. ‘Have a nice evening!’

Yep, it was high time that Tom cleared out of the flat, and for good, she mused while catching up on the last few days’ worth of dirty dishes. High time too for Mac to come back and get on with the housework. 

And high time for Tom to stop rubbing Ben the wrong way with his shameless flirting. Sadly, Tom didn’t seem ready or willing to try anything on beyond shameless flirting, which was getting more than a tad frustrating. Elisabeth had evolved an unspoken rule of only accepting every other invitation he extended for her to go out with him and Ben. It required considerable self-restraint on her part, but Ben seemed to cheer up the moment the two of them grabbed their jackets to go out without her. 

The only other drawback of this strategy, beyond the toll it took on her willpower, was that Tom seemed to think she was playing hard to get, and to relish the challenge. 

But then: why was she letting that get to her? He wasn’t even what you could call dashingly handsome, far from it. He was more like the little pancake tune and the big fresco: a bit left-field but strangely endearing.

Her phone rang in her back pocket, and she pulled it out with a wet hand, forgetting to check who was calling:

‘Elisabeth, what on earth is going on?’ asked Charlotte. 

This was no idle, general enquiry. Charlotte's tone demanded an explanation, but Elisabeth had not had time to work one out just yet:

‘Not much, you know, doing the dishes... Hang on a sec while I dry my hands,’ she said, and crooked her neck onto her phone while she found the towel. 

‘Oh don’t get cute with me, Elisabeth! What’s this I hear about a Tom?’

Elisabeth prepared herself for a chiding.

‘When were you going to introduce me?!’ Charlotte cried at the other end of the line, with so much excitement that Elisabeth let the tea towel drop to the floor to move the phone away from her ear.

‘When was I going to introduce you?’

‘Yes! So what does he do? Is he very handsome? How did you meet him? Is he from work? Is he one of the traders?’

‘Hang on. Hang on hang on hang on,’ said Elisabeth, confused. ‘Aren’t you calling to give me a hard time and feel sorry for Mike?’

‘Naaaaaa, Colin’s been on the landline doing that for over an hour. Sorry if your ears have been buzzing, hon! Where have you been anyway? Canoodling with Tom, I guess?’

‘Nowhere... guess my phone must have been playing up,’ Elisabeth lied. She hated lying to Charlotte. Over time, like every good friend she had learnt that there were things it was best not to be overly sincere about: things like her true opinion of Charlotte's current favourite coat, or the actual calorie content of the cream icing on carrot cake. But though Elisabeth would never have dreamt of lying to Charlotte about anything as big as a relationship before she now found herself considering just that course of action.

‘I know, bloody things,’ Charlotte said, ‘iPhones are even worse, mine lost signal in bloody Selfridges again this afternoon!’

‘Really?’

‘So go on! Who is he?’

Elisabeth stared at the burn marks on the lino at her feet and pondered what to say next. Could she trust Charlotte not to tell Colin, not to tell her future husband, that she wasn’t really going out with any Tom? Perhaps she could, but it would be torture. It would be like sitting Charlotte in front of the most gigantic sugar-frosty carrot cake and telling her not to touch it. She would do it, she was that good a friend, but she would hate every second. And even if she didn’t intend to, she might let slip by accident, and then Colin would for sure go and tell Mike, and that didn’t bear thinking about. Elisabeth had a flashback of Mike rambling on about honesty and changes and new beginnings: it sent a shiver down her spine. 

‘Look, Charlie,' she said, 'I haven’t told you because it’s a really new thing, and it’s uh... it’s really just casual for now. I mean I’m not even sure if I’m going to see the guy again.’

‘Oh really?’ said Charlotte, disappointed. ‘Why, what’s wrong with him?’

‘It’s uh, it’s just... complicated.’ 

How lame. 

In Elisabeth's experience people said "it's complicated" a lot, especially in soaps, when what they meant was that they didn’t want to have to think too hard about the consequences of their actions, or face up to any kind of tough decision. She wasn’t at all above enjoying a good soap, of course, but in the real world a fine analytical mind such as hers had never had very much patience for “it’s complicated”. 

Charlotte, on the other hand, was a complete sucker for it: how convenient. 

‘Oh my god, really? Poor you!’ she cried, and made Elisabeth blush with shame. 

‘Is there someone else?’ Charlotte then whispered and Elisabeth, suspecting there might be as much curiosity as sympathy in the question, briefly stopped beating herself up. With a clearer conscience she now saw an opportunity to indulge Charlotte with a few suitably dark details, whilst indulging herself with a nod in truth’s general direction:

‘Well,’ she sighed, ‘I don’t think he’s quite over his ex, Sara. Actually he says so himself so you see, I just can’t tell where it’s going.’

There: she was back on the path of truth, if perhaps not of enlightenment. Charlotte let out a sympathetic sigh on the other end of the line.

‘Do you think he’s going to leave her for you?’

‘I really have no idea.’

‘I’m sure deep down he loves you but he’s just not ready, he’s still hurting, right?’

Elisabeth blessed the telephone as she beamed at the fresco in front of her. If Charlotte could see her now, she'd be done for. 

And if Tom could hear this! Hear of his burning, tortured love for Sara reduced to such … triteness? She thanked him for equipping her with the word, and soaps for making it so easy to lead Charlotte along. It was wrong to do so, of course, and Elisabeth did feel bad about it, but she reminded herself that she was only lying to save her best friend from having to lie on her behalf. Surely that was alright? 

No, it wasn’t just alright. It was the only decent thing to do: 

‘I guess, it's really hard to tell with Tom sometimes,’ she muttered in the end. 

‘Oh you poor thing! But don’t be down about it, darling, it’ll be fine, you just need to give him time, you know? Give him time to accept his true feelings for you.’

Now for all her guilt Elisabeth couldn’t help but smile: Tom, “accept his true feelings for her”? Gobbledegook, he would say, and laugh. 

No, not in her wildest fantasies did she flatter herself that Thomas Wickham Lorcan George Reilly faced any kind of internal struggle with his urge to flirt with her. And do it very well indeed.

‘You poor poor _poor_ thing, but you’ll be all right!’ Charlotte said again, misinterpreting Elisabeth’s silence.

‘Hey, don’t you feel sorry for me!’ Elisabeth said, jumping at the chance to close the subject: ‘I told you, it’s nothing serious anyway. Just a bit of fun, don’t worry about me, OK?’

‘You sure?’

‘Yes. I am, I’m absolutely fine,’ said Elisabeth truthfully: by far the worst thing about her relationship with Tom right now was having to lie to her best friend about it. And what a best friend: 

‘Should I invite him to the wedding then?’ Charlotte asked, at which not even Elisabeth could reason herself out of feeling terrible. 

‘Oh thanks, that’s so generous of you, Charlie. But I’m not sure Colin would agree and don’t worry, I don’t think Tom and I are quite there yet anyway.’

‘You sure?’

‘Definitely sure.’

‘Just let me know when you are, then! Ooooh I’m so excited!’

Elisabeth blushed with shame and briefly considered backpedalling. No no, much easier to wait a couple of weeks, until Mike was used to leaving her alone, and then just tell Charlotte she’d split up with Tom again. Much easier all around, much more sensible. 

‘Hmmm, don’t be too excited. I mean, not yet. And how’s the wedding going then? Is that what you were at Selfridges for?’

Thankfully Charlotte took the bait.

Who knew lying was so exhausting? 

***

Come eight o’clock the next day Elisabeth was even more shattered. Why oh why had she decided to take Dan and Sophie out? Oh that’s right: Jane was so knackered she could barely function, and since Vincent was too busy catching up with the cricket on Sky to cut her a break, Elisabeth had stepped in and sent her upstairs for a nap. Not without much protestations on Jane’s part, of course, but she had. 

By Saturday evening Elisabeth had found then put on two little pairs of wellies, done up the buttons of two raincoats (Boden naturally, the weekend uniform of the North London middle class child), retrieved one hat (easily) then taken her own boots off, and found the other hat three floors up, on a teddy bear’s head. She’d put her shoes back on, her jacket on, closed the door behind her, walked three paces, walked back three paces, re-opened the door, taken her jacket and shoes back off, taken off one pair of wellies and one coat, lifted a dress, pulled down a pair of little tights, wiped a little bottom, and put all of it back on, then set off for the Heath at snail pace in the rain, then popped back in to fetch the two boxes of organic raisins she’d forgotten on the heater cover in the corridor the second time she’d left the house, then set off a third time, frozen half to death while watching the twins mud sling for 45 minutes until complete nightfall, then stripped them naked in the hall, then taken her shoes and jacket off, run a bath, washed and rinsed two delightful blond curly heads to a screeching duet of protestations, dried them, lathered them (against their will and despite much wriggling) in organic-fragrance-free-non-animal-tested-baby-lotion (not unlike fighting a recalcitrant octopus), bundled them into their White Company PJs (night-time uniform of the North London etc.), rinsed the bath and toys, as promised to Jane, started a washing machine of muddy clothes while boiling pasta, chopped the cucumber and tomatoes, served tea, cleared tea, wiped the organic-no-sugar-added-strawberry-yogurt off the highchairs, table, floor, and, worryingly, the lounge’s DVD player, read three stories (in French), had a shower, changed into her own PJs, and sat down on the front room sofa for about 30 seconds before remembering to get up and put the laundry out.

So as her head hit a crease-free, high thread-count pillowcase in the bijou guest room, Elisabeth congratulated herself on having gone to bed early the previous night rather than out with Ben and Tom. Next she wondered how on earth Jane ever did all this while holding down a job and being pregnant. But to do this while holding down a job, fighting Toad to make MD next year, and getting up three times a night to feed one or possibly more newborns that was, well, probably outside the realm of the possible. 

Soon however, tiredness got the better of Elisabeth’s concern for her friend. She fell into a deep sleep, dreaming of swimming in a red bikini. 

The next morning, like every Sunday, as if fatherhood had never happened to him, Vincent took off to go and play football, leaving his sister to empty the twins’ potties while his wife tried, and failed, to keep down the posh dinner he’d treated her to the previous night. Not for the first time, Elisabeth was struck by the unfairness of the arrangement. Keen though she was to get back home, she waited until Vincent got back from footie, read him the riot act, and did not leave until he had called around a number of posh country spas, and booked a weekend away for his wife and his sister on his own credit card. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> copyright 2021 Mel Liffragh, all rights reserved.


	11. Blown Away

Duty done, Elisabeth walked home and collapsed onto the sofa, but she hadn’t been there five minutes when she heard Tom’s voice behind her:

‘Elisabeth, you have quite the most perfect, quite the most delicious toes.’

She’d never looked at her feet in that way, else she wouldn’t have put them up on the armrest while she caught up on Ben’s copy of _News of the Screws_. She pulled the paper closer to her face and waited for a blush to pass. 

‘Can I have some last pancakes before I go?’ he asked, ‘Pretty please: I haven’t eaten all day waiting for you to come back.’

She put the paper down and here he was, one last time, sat at her feet, grinning away while begging for food. 

‘Is that a yes?’

She shrugged.

‘No wait, can you teach me instead? That’s even better: you teach me, so when you come and visit me at my new place I can make you pancakes.’

‘Sure, yes, that sounds nice.’

He held a hand out for her, dragged her out of the depths of the sofa and to the kitchen. 

‘Where do we start?’ he asked. 

‘You get the bowl, I’ll get the eggs and the milk.’

‘What else do we need?’

‘Flour, a little oil, or butter if you can be bothered to melt it. That’s it really.’

He put a bowl in front of her and she started breaking an egg. 

‘No no no, wait! Let me do it. Oh this is so much fun!’ he said, making a complete hash of breaking the second egg. 

As ever with Tom, he was leaving room for interpretation. Was breaking eggs, clearly for the first time, fun? Probably, yes. Or was he referring to the fact that, rather than come and stand next to her as any sensible cook’s apprentice would have done, he’d chosen to place himself behind her. His arms therefore had to reach around her waist to get to the bowl and his stubbly chin was poking over her right shoulder, having brushed her cheek on its way there. 

She started fishing bits of shell out of the bowl while he broke one more egg. 

‘Is Ben having any?’ she asked. 

‘No, who cares about Ben, these are only for us.’

‘Well in that case you can stop now. Give it a whisk.’

‘Yes ma’am.’

She took her gloopy fingers out of the bowl as he leant in to start stirring, thereby closing the gap between her back and his chest. It felt unexpectedly warm in just a t-shirt, unexpectedly calm too, as her silly heart raced away and her face and ears felt unseasonably hot. 

‘That good enough?’ he asked.

‘Excellent. Perfect. Very good,’ she said, not talking about his egg whisking at all. 

‘What next?’

Ah, what next indeed. Turn around, kiss him, have it over with? 

‘Put a little flour in, slowly.’

He added about half a spoonful. 

‘No sorry, Tom, you do need a little more than that.’

He added another pitiful amount then stirred for a bit in the most elegant and lackadaisical fashion, his chin now resting on her shoulder.

‘Look it’s gone all lumpy, Elisabeth. Shall we put some milk in?’

‘No no, milk’s gonna make it worse. Add flour.’

‘Shouldn’t we be sifting it or something?’

‘Sifts are for wimps. Just stir harder.’

‘Why, isn’t this stirring?’

‘Tom, just pour some flour in, will you?’ she gasped, her chest ready to implode.

He tipped the flour bag, and a white cloud formed above the bowl just as she was looking down. She shut her eyes and heard him burst out into his high-pitched laughter next to her ear. He spun her around by the shoulders and started ruffling the flour out of her hair. Her hands, still gloopy with raw egg white, were even more than usually useless. She tried to hold them out of the way while shaking her head.

‘Tom, leave my hair alone, get this out of my eyes!’

At first his laugh only rose up again, but then he took hold of the sides of her head. Anyone else might have grabbed the nearest kitchen towel, but not so Thomas Reilly: he chose to blow the flour off her face instead. With small playful puffs at first, but after two or three of these even with her eyes closed she could feel his mouth drawing closer to her eyelids. His breaths became longer too, and softer on her skin: he must be millimetres away. Almost touching. His lips brushed the tip of her nose on the way down and he started blowing at her mouth. She could of course have reopened her eyes now, but somehow the longer she thought about it the less she felt like it.

‘’afternoon!’ said Ben, handing her a cold, damp kitchen cloth. She hid her face behind it. 

A couple of hours later Tom left for good, making sure to plant his parting kiss less than half an inch away from her mouth, and linger there awhile. 

xxx

Time slowed down after he moved out. Life just wasn’t as much fun. 

Elisabeth didn’t like to admit it to herself, but she missed him. Ordinarily she would have confided in Charlotte, but it was probably still too early to level up with her. 

Being no good at lying, even by omission, Elisabeth therefore decided to cancel lunch with Charlotte the following Thursday, and trawl Leadenhall Market instead: Jane’s birthday was coming up. She settled in the end for one of those chunky silver charm bracelets from Links, un-noteworthy save for its breathtaking price tag. 

‘Been shopping?’ Will asked when she got back, and dumped the beige and brown, expertly ribbonned bag down under her desk.

‘Aha,’ she said, wondering idly at his unprecedented level of interest in her lunchtime activities. 

‘Didn’t work.’

‘What?’ she said, short for: What makes you think you and I should be engaging in light banter all of a sudden?

‘The retail therapy: it didn’t work. You need to get back out there and spend more.’

Right: humour now? What was up with the lad today? Had he taken to drinking at lunchtime?

‘Spend more and cheer up,’ he clarified.

‘I see,’ she said through pursed lips. Fair enough, she knew she hadn’t been at her most chirpy since Tom have moved out but Will, of all people, was not in her opinion in a position to cast the first stone.

‘Can I have your credit card then?’ she suggested once she’d sat down.

‘You can’t, no. But you might fancy spending some of the … Wandsworth Council Endowment Fund?’ he said, reading the last part from his screen.

‘The what?’

‘They’re after some Xstrata.’

‘Good for them.’

‘D’you want to buy it for them?’

‘No thanks.’

‘Look, Neil saved you the order on Pimms.’

‘Thanks, but no, thanks. I’m not allowed, I'm not … I haven’t got regulatory approval!’ she remembered triumphantly. 

‘Too right you don’t. But you don’t really think we’re going to let you do this unsupervised, do you?’

‘Great, _now_ you're selling it to me.’

‘Thanks!’ Will and Neil said together, and she gave the latter an apologetic wince. ‘But seriously, you two, give me one good reason to do this – you’d be much quicker and better off doing it yourself.’ 

She wasn’t half proud of the last bit: the shameless ego-massage. It was usually failsafe with males in general and traders in particular, but not this time:

‘It’s the boss’s idea but I think he has a point,’ Neil said, ‘You can’t always be trying to analyse what we’re doing and never actually try doing it.’

‘Hey, it’s never stopped me before. Research is the true path of contemplation, I’ll have you know. Are you saying that all the accountants that audit … I don’t know, pig farms, that they should all try pig farming?’

‘World might be a better place,’ Will mused. She turned and, for the second time today, repressed a smile at him:

‘True,’ she said, ‘but that’s not the point.’

‘No: the point is you could do your job a lot better if you tried doing ours just the once.’

She knew it was silly, but he’d just pushed her largest and reddest button.

‘OK just the once, bring it on,’ she heard herself say.

‘Great! Where do you start?’ Neil asked.

‘Oh that’s easy: I check the _Indications of Interest_ ,’ she said. She’d heard them bicker for access to Bloomberg’s “IoI” screen often enough to know what it was for: seeing which stocks which brokers were looking to trade. 

‘Wrong,’ Will said, ‘You start by checking what the hell you’re supposed to do.’

‘Ah, good point. How much do we want: you did say we were buying, right?’

Will and Neil were both grinning from ear to ear, and fair enough. She decided the best route was to carry on playing the innocent for their amusement -admittedly not a huge stretch of her acting abilities right now, but she briefly contemplated making it more fun for them by switching on the comedy French accent.

‘You’re buying almost fifty grand’s worth,’ Neil said, pointing at the left-most one of his three screens. 

‘And Xstrata trades in pounds, right, not in Swiss Francs or Bahts anything?’ she asked, turning to raise a sarcastic eyebrow at Will.

‘Pence, actually,’ he said with perhaps just a tinge of amusement in his grey eye.

‘So how many shares is that?’ she asked, craning towards Neil’s screen again.

‘7,128.’

Elisabeth looked at numbers the way most people look at other people: do I know you? How do I know you? Where do you come from? Where do you fit in? How can I categorise you so I remember you next time? Hence while she jotted 7,128 down in her notepad next to “Buy 50k” she was musing out loud: 

‘That's a pleasing number: divides by 4, 11, by 9 of course, and I reckon even by….’

‘Focus,’ said Will.

‘Sure. So now can I look at those IoIs?’

Neil wheeled himself to the Bloomberg terminal and pulled a screen of 12 rows, all of brokers’ names with a declared interest in trading Xstrata. Three said “closed”, which narrowed it down to a mere nine, eight taking out Rheinland, who were still confined to the doghouse for the foreseeable future. She sighed and frowned and then got a brainwave. If you were trading something again and again, it was arguably better to go back to the same broker so that, assuming the “relationship” with you was worth their while, they’d keep it quiet and just the one house would get to find out what you were up to:

‘Neil, have we been buying this of late? Who from?’

‘Good thought!’ he said, and with a smile of encouragement he pulled a Pimms screen he’d obviously had ready all along. But though she frowned and peered at it and pulled at her hair, Neil’s screen refused to help: it just took a lot of squinting sorting and scrolling to establish that they hadn’t traded Xstrata for the four days that stupid clunky system would let her look at. She sat back and frowned to herself for a moment longer under Will’s stern gaze, and Neil’s more patient one.

‘You know, give me half an hour and I could knock together a Sybase query into Pimms’ database to see who you’ve been to last, and then display it into the spreadsheet,’ she said. 

Neither Will nor Neil's well-trained poker faces betrayed any reaction. 

‘Or you guys could just tell me, I mean it could be any one of those,’ she said with a very Gallic flap of the hand at the IoI screen. 

They didn't tell her. Instead Will said an indifferent: 

‘Your call,’ which was no help at all.

Neil, thankfully, showed a little more grace and eventually said:

‘I guess she’s getting the idea, right?’ He checked with the boss, who gave a barely perceptible shrug of approval. ‘Of late it’s between LTG and Smith-McGregor.’

‘Thanks! And you know, I could definitely write you guys that piece of code if you like.’ 

‘Focus,’ Will said again, pointing at her dealerboard. 

‘I don’t know anyone at Smithies,’ she said, feeling her pulse quicken at the mere thought of having to call some total stranger, let alone negotiate a 50 grand purchase, ‘Do you mind if I try LTG first?’

‘Oh so now you care who the people are at the end of these lines?’ Will asked. 

‘I do, yes. I’m rubbish on first acquaintance.’

‘Couldn’t agree more: go on then.’

Not that she really did know anyone at LTG, she only knew that Neil played the beer game with them. But in her dire straits even that was better than nothing. 

‘Tom kind of knows you already,’ Neil said kindly.

She frowned, then remembered Neil’s Tom, the presumably dull, non-charming, non-flirty one he played the beer game with. 

‘Should I just introduce myself as the French geek then?’

‘Focus,’ Will said. 

‘Go on!’ Neil nodded.

Now that she’d moved desks there was a proper dealer board in front of her, a fabulous instrument of power, with its five rows of neatly labelled buttons, and access to one hundred secure, recorded phone lines. 

Unfortunately at the end of those lines were real human beings, hence the dealerboard had never been Elisabeth’s idea of a dream-machine. It was probably the one piece of technology around this desk that she’d never remotely fantasised about. Bloomberg? Bloody good data, shame about the API. Reuters? Sweet API, shame about the data. But calling someone? Having to talk a stranger into doing something for you? No, no thank you. 

Big global LTG was on the top row on her board, fourth in from the left, whereas small London shop Smith-McGregor was way down the bottom, second one in. 

‘I’m not allowed…’ she muttered again, with her right index finger trembling above the button and her throat tightening.

‘Oh, go on!’ Will said, reaching over to hit the LTG button for her, and hand over her headset. She put it on in blind panic as the green led below the LTG button went from green to flashing green. She heard first Neil then Will click into the line from their desks while it rang. Her heart was racing away, but she found time to be grateful at least not to have to do this on speakerphone.

‘LTG, Rob speaking, who is this?’ she heard, and a solid red light lit up next to the green one under the button. 

‘It’s, uh, Elisabeth Bennet,’ she mumbled. ‘Can I speak to Tom, Tom… Abbott!’ she recalled triumphantly from the “market colour” emails she ignored from him on a daily basis. She searched Neil’s face for any sign of approval, but it remained impassive. 

‘Sure, who did you say you were?’ asked Rob.

‘It’s Elisabeth Bennet.’

‘I’m sorry, who? Are you new on the desk?’

‘Tell him the French geek,’ she sighed, despairing of herself.

‘Hang on,’ said Rob, unfazed, as Will and Neil’s faces briefly relaxed into smiles. Oh good, at least _they_ were enjoying this.

‘Tom Abbott speaking!’ came another voice, friendly enough for her heartbeat to go back down a fraction.

‘Hi, it’s Elisabeth.’

‘Oh yeah, right, you’re the quant, right? What can I do you for? Do you need any data, or are you finally joining the beer game?’

‘If only: actually, I’m calling about Xstrata.’

‘Ah, on Xstrata you want to talk to Robsie, hang on. Rob, back to you on line 3,’ she heard and, to her horror, he clicked back out of the line. She looked at Neil in blind panic, but he just smiled on at her:

‘Hello again, Elisabeth Bennet!’ came Rob’s voice, carrying just the right commercial amount of friendliness.

‘Hello again, Rob, sorry, I thought…’

‘Xstrata, right?’ he asked. Thank goodness these guys were paid to know what to say.

‘Yes, we need to... ’ Elisabeth started,

‘Got any _form_ today?’ Will interrupted with a hard pointed look in her direction.

‘Oh hi, Will. How are you there, mate?’ Rob asked while Elisabeth kicked herself. As the boys were wont to say, rule number one of trading is: keep your knickers on, and don’t show anything you shouldn’t. Open, on the other hand, by saying whether you want to buy or sell something, and any broker worth their salt will start front-running you before you’ve even finished your sentence. Elisabeth of all people should have remembered this after the Rheinland incident. You ask about “form”. 

Form.

Form form form form form she repeated mentally, her cheeks turning a burning shade of crimson.

‘Hey, Rob,’ Will said meanwhile. 

‘So you guys have a new joiner? You should have told us, when are we taking her out?’ Rob asked. 

‘Don’t hold your breath,’ Will said, ‘This is a bit of an experiment.’

‘Shame,’ Rob said pleasantly. 

‘Indeed,’ said Will in just the same tone of indifferent pleasantry. ‘So what’s the colour in Xstrata then?’

Dark red, thought Elisabeth, raising one hand to her cheek. 

‘Yeah,’ said Rob meanwhile, ‘we were sellers this morning, had quite a big client order, index rebalance business, you know, no strong views. We’ve been doing little clips all day but we’re nearly done now, I was gonna wait ‘til the close to do the rest, I reckon it might bounce, why, would you like to take the other side?’

Which was broker jargon for: Xstrata? We’ve got so much of the stuff it’s coming out of our ears, but hey, we’re cool, we wouldn’t want you to think we’re desperate to sell them or anything. 

‘Would you?’ Rob asked again when no one answered his question.

‘Would you?’ Will asked Elisabeth. ‘Go on, make a call.’ 

She didn’t have the faintest idea but yeah, why not? Sounded reasonable, if this guy was trying to sell them anyway. Only how did she go about finding out whether Rob had enough for her… what was it again, 50 grands’ worth? Oh, this was just too stressful for words. Was now the time to open up to Rob, or not yet? She had no idea, she’d never had the remotest talent for timing, and for goodness’s sake, this was why she worked with computers. 

She really couldn’t think of any clever way to go about this so she just assumed someone would jump in again if she came out with anything too dangerously stupid:

‘How much have you got?’ she asked.

‘How much do you need?’

‘About fifty thousand…’

‘Wow. OK, fifty thou, yeah. That’s a bit more than we had left to do but we’ll take the rest on. I’m sure we can work it for you by the close.’

She checked Will’s face, but he made extra sure to keep each one of his perfect features still, in that practised way of his. Perhaps he had the tiniest of glints in his steely eye, but by that point she couldn’t have said whether it was from finding her laughable, or just plain exasperating. 

‘OK…’ she ventured. 

‘OK, so market order, right? Or do you have a limit?’

‘Do I have a limit?’ she asked her screen, then remembered that this was why Raj had equipped her with a Reuters license. So she could check the live, real-time prices of things. “Market order” meant Rob would do his best to find a seller for her buy order, and pass on whatever price he could get. That struck her as a little desperate, even for a quant’s first trade. 

She crooked her neck while she clicked on XTA.L on the flashing screen of FTSE index constituents which she always kept on her right hand screen - so far mostly for decoration. 676p, down from a high of the day of about 680 and seemingly still on its way down.

‘Call me if it gets above 678,’ she said, sounding a lot more confident than she felt.

‘Good call,’ Neil nodded.

‘Usual rate?’ Rob asked. 

‘I’m sorry, Rob, I really have no idea what that is.’

‘Agency rate: 9 bips?’ he asked, and now he started to sound impatient. She looked at Neil, who smiled a yes. 

‘Yeah that’s right, fine,’ she said. Not quite 50 quids’ worth of commission: she could see why Rob didn’t feel like chatting on to her. 

‘Pleasure doing business with you,’ he lied, and hung up. 

She didn’t buy that for a second, but who cared, what she needed to buy was Xstrata and in that respect the worst was over: her trade was away being “worked”.

‘What do I do now?’ she asked, and felt all the energy drain away from her as soon the red led went off under LTG’s button. 

‘Keep an eye on the stock, send him the booking allocation file, get on with your day,’ Will replied, already clicking away at his own computer.

‘Right, OK.’

‘By the way that Pimms query, you know, checking which brokers we’ve been using last.’

‘Yes?’

‘Can you do it today?’

‘Today’s getting on a bit, but I can try.’

‘Please do,’ he said, and turned back to his screens again. 

OK, right, so she tried to gather her wits, minimised the Reuters window and the VBA one she’d been working on before lunch, which revealed that Outlook had a new message for her:

* * *

**From** : Tom Reilly <reilly_weerd@hotmail.com>

 **To** : Elisabeth R Bennet <er.bennet@____.com>

Cc:

 **Subject** : Waving at you over the e-ther

 **Sent** : Thu, 21/10/1999 14:23

Hello there dearest. 

Are you looking through the screen, staring at the pixels hard enough to melt them into e-jelly? Then, just then, you may be able to see me wave at you through the e-ther. 

Hope you don’t mind, Ben passed on your email. Said you are coming to the gig next week. Oh, goodeee: looking forward to seeing you again, so we can shout at each other to music once more. 

If that’s not too trite for you. 

Tom

* * *

Her face relaxed and half of her brain started knocking that Sybase query together, while the other half thought of what to reply to Tom. Periodically she also kept checking Xstrata’s price: still going down, perfect. Now she thought back on it, buying 50 grands’ worth of Xstrata had been unpleasant, but it hadn’t been a lot more difficult than buying her last Eurostar ticket to France either. Trading really was just glorified shopping. 

* * *

**From** : Elisabeth R Bennet <er.bennet@______.com>

 **To** : Tom Reilly <reilly_weerd@hotmail.com>

Cc:

 **Subject** : RE: Waving at you over the e-ther

 **Sent** : Thu 21/10/1999 15:13

What? They'll be playing actual music at that gig? No one told me but yes, that's definitely something to look forward to.

Unlike you, evidently, I'm a tad busy at work right now. Dear WW decided I should try trading so I'm buying some Xstrata for the desk. I guess I'll try anything once, but predictably I've hated every second of the experience. Right now, for instance, I should be keeping an eye on it rather than writing to you.

So yes, I look forward to seeing you next week, never mind the soundtrack.

Z.

* * *

There, perfectly appropriate: this was turning into quite a good day after all! What was that price again? 670 –brilliant, she was well on her way to becoming a trading goddess. Even Will was drawn to comment on it:

‘Looks like blowing 50 grand does put you in a good mood.’

‘I thought that was the idea?’ 

‘Of course,’ he said, but with what she sensed to be a sarky undertone. Was she that transparent, that Will could somehow read Tom’s email on her face? 

‘Lizzie, LTG for you, pick up,’ Andy shouted from the other side of the screens, which wiped the smile right off her face again. This time, at least, she was able to grab her headset quite by herself, and click into the line.

‘Lizzie? Rob.’

‘Hi, Rob.’ she said, sufficiently relaxed to find time to wonder whether this Rob hated being called Rob as much as she hated being called Lizzie.

‘Right, so we’re doing great here. I’ve done your first 10,000 shares no problem at all, plenty of sellers out there, the stock’s down so you’re getting a great price, just wanted to check if you'd sent the allocation file yet because I haven't got anything from you yet.’ 

She frowned:

‘Sorry, you’ve done how many shares?’ she asked, feeling her throat begin to dry out and constrict all over again. 

‘Ten thousand… four hundred to be precise,’ Rob said proudly and, just as outright panic was setting in, she heard Will click into the line. 

‘But we didn’t _want_ ten thousand shares!’ she cried, feeling her voice break before she heard it. Now she could see why the guys swore and shouted all the time: a lot more dignified than the pathetic croak she’d just produced. 

‘No, you said you wanted fifty thou,’ Rob said with perfect equanimity.

‘Fifty thousand _pounds_ , Rob! Fifty grand’s worth! Didn’t I tell you seven thousand one hundred and twenty eight shares?’

‘No you didn’t.’

‘You sure I didn’t? It’s such a… wait, I did just send you the booking details, just look at it, the email definitely says…’

‘When did you send it?’

‘Just now, as soon as Neil passed it on, I…’

‘OK yeah, I see it now. Sorry, Lizzie, but you definitely said fifty thou and we’re already dealt on the first ten.’

‘Can’t you…?’ 

Couldn’t he what? Oh crap, what had she done?

‘Rob?’ Will said while she literally started pulling at her hair. Hard, from a point half way between her right ear and occiput. Three thousand shares at about 7 quid each, she’d just got a small public body’s pension fund 21 grand overdrawn: well done her.

‘Hey, Will, so what do we do?’

‘For now just pull the rest of the order. It’s our bad so we’ll get a sell order to you. Settle the two against each other,’ he said without any perceptible stress or indeed, for once, irritation. 

‘Sure thing.’

‘It may take us a while to get the sell order out to you, but if you tell me how many you’ve bought exactly, you can start selling back before they hit the floor,’ Will continued.

‘Sure thing, so that’s gonna be, what, 3,272?’

‘You got 10,400 done exactly?’

‘Aha, so far, yes.’

Besides the fact that they were both doing sums, or rather subtractions, at the speed of light, you would have thought the two of them were just discussing the weather. 

‘Can you do us a favour then, and start selling 3,272 shares off your book, ‘til we get the order out to you?’ Will asked. 

‘Sure thing, mate. Ring back when the order’s ready or if there’s any change.’

‘Wait, Rob, what price did you get?’ she asked. 

‘Average so far, let’s see: 674.3.’

‘Cheers, Rob,’ said Will, and cut the line. 

‘I’m so sorry,’ she whimpered. 

‘So are you calling the Portfolio Manager or am I?’ Will replied, not remotely fussed. 

‘I’ll do it. It’s my bad, I’m so sorry.’

‘Save the apologies and get on with it,’ he said - again in a perfectly equable tone. 

Elisabeth picked up the phone and, with a heavy heart, she dialled the portfolio manager’s extension. Insensitive to the urgency of the situation, he first of all made her grovel for over ten minutes, during which Elisabeth begun to contemplate hacking into Pimms and putting the damn sell order in herself. She knew where to find the source code for his input screen into the system, and nowadays she had a developer’s ID for it. Hell, if she’d wanted to she could have been the next Nick Leeson. She really ought to point this out at her next bonus review. 

The portfolio manager relinquished at last, leaving Elisabeth free to do the maths, and to wait impatiently until the closing auction for the last of her sell order to get filled. She then found that altogether her losses for the day came to just under £500. She wrote up all about it in the Risk team’s neat little “Transaction Incident Report” template, emailed it to them, and of course copied Raj in.

‘Great work today, Lizzie. See you tomorrow,’ Will said as he stood up to go. 

He too had had to stay on after the close in order to sign off on the whole sorry mess.

‘I’m really sorry.’

‘Not at all, I’ve enjoyed this,’ he said, and left. 

Smarmy bastard. 

xxx

Elisabeth braced herself for the worst ahead of their conference call with Raj the next day, but true to the “collegial buy-side culture” he glossed over her loss and focused instead on that marvellous new query she’d written. He now wanted to release it in New York too. All of five lines of code, but in Raj’s verbiage these five lines became “a great example of thought leadership” and “fantastic teamwork” which, she noticed, seemed to make Will cringe every bit as much as it did her. 

Then Raj indirectly promoted her by referring to their weekly conference call as a “management level strategic steering group” and, best of all, he promoted her outright by asking her to hire an analyst to help with the programming on tradePad. He was sending her the last MIT alumni book, full of IT-literate Europeans. 

So for her next trick, Elisabeth would get to work not with just another useless PhD in accounting, or finance, or worse, both, but with a proper MIT engineer. Imagine the fun they’d have! She couldn’t believe it. 

All she had to do was go in with Will for his weekly meeting with Toad, and OK it all with him. 

Incredible. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the non British reader, _News of the Screws_ was the nickname of the now defunct weekly gossip paper _News of the World_.
> 
> copyright 2021 Mel Liffragh, all rights reserved.


	12. Not one of the old boys

What a complete and utter disaster: what had just happened? 

Elisabeth tried to figure it out on the way back to her desk, but she could not begin to make any sense of it. 

The meeting with Toad had started in the usual manner: twenty minutes late, with a few idle rounds of name-dropping between him and Willy Wanker. Then, _a propos_ nothing, Toad had turned to her and asked what she was here for.

Not exactly encouraging, but this was one question she’d been ready to field for a long time. She had figures for Toad that even he would understand. Love, even: hard pounds and pence, actual cash savings, amounts she’d computed based on the New York experience of using tradePad. It all sounded so great it was a no brainer, really: greater scalability, risk reduction _and_ lower costs, what was not to love? 

What indeed? Why was it that, instead of gaining Toad’s support for the project, her answer had unleashed Armageddon? A torrent of pissed-off questions: Why was a researcher doing this? Who had approved the budget? When? How many programmers? Who cared what they were doing in New York? This was London, last time Toad had checked. And anyway: where was the PPP for all this? 

Those three letters still struck dread into Elisabeth. The PPP, short for Project Prioritisation Proposal, was a 26 page document template designed by the bank's tentacular IT department to optimise the stalling of all software development. PPPs were presented by various departments to six-weekly Strategic IT Project Board Meetings made up, in equal and opposite parts, of IT people with no understanding of fund management, and of fund managers with no understanding of IT. The outcome was normally to prioritise fixing the bugs identified since the previous meeting in existing systems, and to approve the hiring of yet more IT personnel while postponing all open and new PPPs. If, in short, tradePad went down the PPP route, then it would die. 

A long, slow, agonising death, of strangulation by red tape. 

Now Will, she was pretty sure, didn’t even know what a PPP was. Yet despite his complete ignorance he’d somehow known to switch to uber-schmooze mode and rescue the situation. 

“Somehow” was not, in this case, an idle figure of speech, because what made Elisabeth want to scream out with frustration as they walked back to the desk was that she still failed to see how more random name dropping, together with some random story about some guy Will used to work with having some random IT disaster at some random hedge fund, had anything to do with either tradePad -or PPPs. And yet, _somehow_ , that had done the trick. 

That, and a joke about how cheap she was, compared to an army of programmers. 

Yes, really.

What she did understand all too well, “management-level-strategic-steering-group-membership” notwithstanding, was that the old boys were preparing to shaft her in classic City style. So what if Will and Toad thought Java was something you got at Starbucks? So what if without her they wouldn’t have the first clue how to set up a pivot table in Excel, let alone roll out a real time trading system? If she knew anything about this place then as soon as tradePad launched, as she would make sure it did, then the credit would be all theirs. Raj might have given her a bright new beginning on the trading desk, but the happy ending wasn't going to be hers this time either. It was going to be Toad's. Again. Blooming stupid useless evil effing... 

‘Lizzie?’

She carried on walking, unaware that Will had stopped and was calling her from halfway across the atrium. He called again and this time she turned around and stopped:

‘Yes?’ 

‘ you heading home now?’

‘Yes?’

‘I’ll walk you out.’

‘Sure,’ she said with a shrug, though it was a strange and unpleasant idea and she’d much rather be left alone. 

‘Sit down, we're not done,’ he said as she walked off again. 

She complied, too shaken still to start fighting with him as well.

‘First of all: sorry, obviously, for the crass joke,’ he said, ‘I hope you realise it was for a good cause?’ 

She thought he looked sincere enough, albeit in that cold, detached way of his:

‘Sure. I mean I’m sure I’ve heard worse before and yes, I do realise,’ she said with a nod and another cheerless shrug.

‘Good. In that case, and in the team’s interest, can I presume to advise you?’

She tucked her notepad under one arm, stuffed her hands into her trouser pockets and stared at the table between them: did he perhaps think she’d failed to notice that she’d messed up? 

'Look,' she said, indeed looking back up at him, and talking slowly so he would get it first time around and leave well alone: ‘I screwed up in there, I think I figured that out. So thank you very much for fixing it, Will, and now shoot me.’

‘Oh come on...’

Staring at him this blankly was probably rude, but Will's hair was still growing back and it was now a shapeless mess in dire need of a cut. In her current state of mind that was yet another annoying thing about him. 

‘Look, Lizzie,' he was saying, 'we all know how terribly clever you are. I didn’t get half of what you went on about the other day in that meeting with Raj, about servers and replication and VPPs.’

‘VP _N_ s:’ she said, ‘Virtual. Private. Networks.’

He began to smile, which annoyed her some more because she had a feeling it wasn’t _Virtual Private Network_ s he was finding funny: 

‘Yes thank you for that, Lizzie. That was my point. What I did get, is that this launch is going to be a complete nightmare, and that you’re the only person in this office with any clue how to make it happen.’ 

‘Thanks,’ she said, her brow knitted with equal doses of surprise and suspicion. She knew that he was now under direct orders from Raj to be nice to her, like it or lump it, but most likely the latter. By admitting that he needed her on tradePad, he’d also just shed light on his newfound interest in honing her trading skills, Lizzy-ing her and now pulling her aside for a cosy atrium chat. However, something also told her these niceties must be a polite prelude to the most enormous “but” in history, and he did not disappoint:

‘But if you’ll excuse me, when it comes to negotiations, you’re a bit of a liability.’

Truth hurts. In this instance it hurt like a fresh punch to the chest. How unfair. How bloody unfair! After all if Will insisted that they point out the obvious to each other, then she could for instance have a go at his ridiculous hair or at his French. Should she remind him that his contact at SocGen was in fact called Xavier, with an X? Not Zaviere with an e at the end. And certainly not “Zav”.

‘Then again you can be a really entertaining kind of liability,’ Will continued, the fool, beginning to smile again. 

Elisabeth stared at him, and pinched her lips tight so as not to bite his head off. 

‘So glad one of us enjoyed it,’ she said, and crossed her arms, much as he did when squaring off to people he didn't like. 

‘Oh, Lizzie, come on now.’ 

There was a spark of amusement in his eye as he said this, which she knew full well to be at her expense, and which killed off what little was left of her sense of humour:

‘What? You want to talk about it? Yeah, I think I’m vaguely aware I don’t go down well with the Toads of this world, thanks. Thanks for pointing out the bleeding obvious, Will.’

‘All right, sorry again, Jesus! Only trying to help.’

Now she really wanted to kick herself as well as him and Toad. A minute ago she was merely an entertaining kind of liability, but now with Will’s help she was turning into a complete pathetic whiner as well. Wonderful, just when she didn’t need more reasons to hate herself. She uncrossed her arms and made herself take a few breaths through her nose before she opened her stupid mouth again:

‘I know, Will, I’m sorry. But seriously look at me, I can’t exactly help it if I’m not one of the old boys, can I?’

‘That you aren’t, no,’ he smiled, but thankfully put his serious face back on before she had time to hate him for it: ‘Anyway look, I really don’t think that’s the problem anyway.’

‘Easy for you to say.’

He nodded and, for once, did not contradict. 

‘But seriously, Will, I can't help it the guy's always hated me. I gave him the facts, what else could I do ?’

‘Think. What does Toad respond to? What does he like?’ 

Strangely Will was smiling at her again. She couldn’t see anything in what she’d just said to make him smile at her expense. In the end she was forced to conclude that perhaps Fitzwilliam Kingsley-Darcy might be making an effort towards behaving nicely. No doubt the effort was expanded for Rajeev’s sake rather than her own, nonetheless Elisabeth tried her best to emulate it:

‘What Toad likes? I don’t know: name dropping? Golf? Long liquid lunches?’

‘Correct.’

‘See, Will, none of that plays to any of my core competencies.’

‘We’ll get back to that. But what are the two things that are guaranteed to raise his heckles?’ 

‘Hmmm, not sure, but I’ll go for tradePad and Elisabeth Bennet!’

‘Close!’ he smiled. ‘But sadly, humour is another thing that’s totally wasted on him. Try again.’

‘No thanks,’ she said, as Toad’s angry face flashed back into her exhausted brain.

Will sat back and stared at her, arms crossed, clearly expecting more but what was the point? She might as well give up and anyway, with all his skill for schmoozing how come Will was still pushing this? Couldn’t he tell how bad her head was hurting by now? She let her eyes drop and with her finger traced one of the black veins running across the white marble of the tabletop. 

‘All right, be pig-headed, for a change,’ she heard him say, and looked back up. He uncrossed his arms and leant forward, placing his hands on the edge of the table. Where she would have been gesticulating he was merely punctuating his speech with the lightest taps of his long middle finger on the table:

‘I’ll tell you what would piss Toad off: first _,_ would be to tell him how it’s done in the US. For fuck's sake even you hate that, Lizzie. And second _,_ would be to tell him to go with it because Raj says so. Everyone knows they hate each other’s guts. You just need to learn to play dumb sometimes, Lizzie – yes, even you can do that. It’s easy enough, really: just stop telling Toad what to do, start presenting him with a problem instead, to which there’s only one solution, being the one you’re proposing. Except that you never _ever_ propose it, so that it can all be his brilliant idea. Think you could do that?’

Elisabeth frowned down at the table: Will was being unfair, she hadn’t told Toad to support tradePad because that was how they did things in New York. Nor had she told Toad to go along because Raj said so, even she wasn’t that stupid. But then… well perhaps Will was right, this must be how Toad had chosen to interpret what she had seen as plain neutral facts: the 80% reduction in trading errors “in New York”, the 40% drop in commission costs being "replicable for trading everywhere”. Perhaps she had, indeed, been telling Toad over and over again what a wonderful idea he hadn’t had, because Raj had had it first. 

‘Well, perhaps…’

Elisabeth started thinking back to how many times she had made that same mistake before, and it wasn't a happy thought. Having grown up in the country of Descartes, her entire education had taught her to reason, to build sound arguments , then to present them elegantly. Various schools and universities had rewarded for excelling at this. Then she had, foolishly as it now turned out, carted her Cartesian logic with her into the British workplace, with the result that now computers loved her, but no boss ever had. 

She felt her cheeks heat up - oh the humiliation! The worst thing was that Will was right about this too: dealing with the Toads of this world was in fact easy enough, even for her. Only she’d never thought of handling a Managing Director the way she handled Dan and Sophie. With the twins she knew better than to ask what they wanted to eat, for instance. To which the answer would be something along the lines of popcorn and pancakes, with hundreds and thousands, chocolate sauce, whipped cream and chocolate chips on top, meaning that if they just got the pancakes and chocolate sauce they’d kick and scream like the spoilt brats they were. Instead she offered the twins a choice of green beans or spinach, leaving them delighted to eat their beans. Simple enough.

Then she realised that having to be put right by Will on something this glaringly obvious was not, actually, the worst thing. Worse was: Will had just thrown a hand grenade at the one pillar of her corporate identity. Until today she'd never thought to put a name on it but now she did, it wasn't a name she liked very much: victimhood. The story of her career so far went something like: Toad and his chums are complete scumbags who nick all my ideas, appropriate my work and never promote me. Whereas today as it turned out Toad and his chums were still complete scumbags, but she did not have to let them win. By behaving like a victim for so long she’d not just been an idiot, she’d also been a bloody whiner, and she couldn’t be sure which she hated more: idiots or whiners. 

Seriously, moaners vs. imbeciles: tough call, right? Not that it mattered, because she’d been both: 

‘I’m sorry, I’ve been such an idiot,’ she said, to her notepad.

‘You certainly made a couple of bad calls in there today, yes,’ Will said, and she looked up at him again: stern but calm. A lot calmer than she would have been had she been confronted with anyone as self-indulgently inane as she’d just discovered herself to have been. There was nobility in that, and probably not a little self-restraint. 

‘Glad we’re finding stuff to agree on,’ she joked bitterly. She saw she’d raised a fresh smile from him, and tried her best to emulate it. 

‘That’s the spirit,’ he said, coming forward on his seat again, 'Now back to the name-dropping thing.'

‘Do we have to?’

‘We do, because there is one more thing that works a treat with idiots like Toad – can you guess?’

‘I can’t, no. I give up, Will, really I do.’

‘Oh, Lizzie come on. Put up a fight, this isn't like you...’

But how on earth did he expect her to behave like herself after what she’d discovered? And why should she want to, when her “self” turned out to be such a moany, whiny, idiotic one anyway?

‘No? OK,’ Will said when she did not reply, ‘so let me tell you a story.’

‘What?’

‘See, you looked up. No one ever looks up when you tell them you're going to reel off some facts, do they? Or do they?'

'Back in Research they did, actually. Mostly so they could try and poke holes at them, but...'

'But Toad did look up too, when I started telling him about my friend Dean’s terrible experience with his terrible central-IT at his new hedge fund, didn’t he?’

‘I guess that’s what turned him, yes…’

‘That and calling you cheap.’

She frowned, and he took the smile off his face:

‘Sorry, I really shouldn’t have enjoyed it as much as I did. Point is, Lizzie: it really doesn’t matter what kind of bullshit story you’ve got to make up, provided it makes your point for you.’

Her frown deepened.

'It doesn't even matter where your friends work, trust me. Take that girl you go to lunch with, tell Toad she just hired someone, who once worked with a guy, whose boss used to be the last guy he mentioned. Works every time – in my experience.'

The frown on her face deepened another notch while, under his patient stare, it slowly sunk in that he'd made up his whole story for Toad. Bluff, of course: every trader's favourite weapon. Or as the rest of the world called it: lying through your teeth. You could have heard the penny drop in her head, and although she hadn't thought it possible she now felt even more like an idiot than she had before.

'The key thing is, always have three links to the chain, in case you need to use the middle one for plausible deniability.'

She nodded at the table, stunned.

'Your face is a picture,' he said.

She was thinking how lucky it was for her that Will was under Raj's strict orders to get on with her. In a real jungle, he could and would have had her for breakfast. In a plausibly deniable way. 

‘My god, you’re good…’ she said in the end, shaking her head with disbelief. ‘I … I really don’t want to end up on the wrong side of you, Will.’

‘Likewise, actually. Now let’s go, before you lose your sense of humour over it. Rare enough for a French woman to have one.’

‘I’m British.’

‘Yeah, right. Come on then, let’s get out of here.’

Later, as they stepped into the lift, he noticed the copy of Moby Dick sticking out of her coat pocket. 

‘You reading this?’

‘It’s a strange book,’ she said, conscious of quoting Tom. ‘Even second time around.’

‘You should read Tolstoy,’ he said. Then, even more unexpectedly: ‘Perhaps you have?’

‘Nope.’

‘You should. It’s more fun than you think. You two’d get on.’

‘Would we? Isn’t he a bit, what is it -dead?’

'A bit. But you could definitely do with swatting up on winning military strategies,’ he smiled. 

‘That’s fair enough. Do I have to start with _War and Peace_ , then?’

‘I’d say start with the war bits of that, yes, but both his novels are good. It’s the essays on land management you want to stay well away from.’

‘I’ll remember that.’

xxx

Of course tonight, of all nights, was the night when Charlotte was at church again and Tom was back in Oxford for a gig and didn’t call at all. Even the normally reliable Jane was out at some shindig for clients at the Royal Albert Hall, so Charlotte had to make do with talking to her brother. 

Since familiarity breeds contempt and Elisabeth had shared a roof with Vincent for twelve years, he was about the last person she wanted to talk to tonight. After the roller-coaster ride of the last few days, however, she knew she must be grateful for even his inattentive ear. 

As always with Vincent, he took a far more sanguine view of other people’s problems, than of his own. On the plus side, this meant that he failed to see why his baby sister should feel the least bit guilty about lying to dump Mike. Likewise he made light of her 500 quid trading loss, pointing out that it was nothing to the quarter of a million she’d made the bank earlier. 

She still struggled to see it that way, but since that trade she had revised her opinion of the traders’ unsmiling poker faces and uncouth speech. Vincent could say what he wanted about them being “used to” losing five, six, and occasionally seven digit figures; she now thought them incredibly graceful about it, and had nothing but the deepest respect for their sang-froid. She’d almost finished telling Vincent about her disastrous meeting with Toad and Will when she thought she heard him munching on the other side of the line.

‘Sorry, were you in the middle of dinner?’ she asked. 

‘Just having the kids’ leftovers, never mind. Go on.’

‘Well, then he basically told me to grow up and start looking out for myself, and now I feel about this big.’

‘How big?’

‘I dunno, about half an inch?’ she said, measuring it with her free hand. ‘You know how Mike always used to whine about everything but never actually do anything? It really pains me to say this but Will’s right: that’s exactly what I’ve been doing for my entire career,’

‘Hang on, how does Will know about Mike?’ Vincent interrupted.

‘He doesn’t! That’s not what I was saying! What I am saying is: the very thing that what used to annoy me about Mike, the moaning, I’ve been doing exactly the same thing with Toad all along: just moan and wait for the world to see the injustice of it all. And that’s not only stupid and counter-productive, it’s immature. From now on I’m just gonna have to work around Toad same as Jane does, same as everyone else...’

‘You know, talking of Jane, perhaps she was right. It is quite messy in here, come to think of it,’ Vincent interrupted.

Charlotte wanted to strangle him. Yes, she did want to speak to him about Jane, and about tidying up and trying to be nice to his pregnant wife. At some point. But right now she’d just shared a momentous discovery with him and what she wanted was for him to venture an opinion, preferably an encouraging one. She should have known better:

‘I keep saying you should listen to your wife,’ she said, ‘but then I guess you listen to me even less than you listen to her, right?’

‘Sorry, what?’ he asked mid-munch. 

He wasn’t joking. How could it be fair that the older, male Bennet sibling had never got any flack about his conversational skills? 

‘Anyway go on, how’re things with you?’ she said, concluding that, just like with Dan, Sophie or Toad, she may as well stop bemoaning her brother’s idiosyncrasies, and start working around them instead. 

‘Well, thanks for remembering to ask, yes,’ he sighed, ‘Let me tell you, those pregnancy hormones aren’t doing anything for me at the moment. I just can’t seem to do anything right. The nagging! Truth be told I’m kind of glad she’s out tonight.’

‘Ah yes, well, poor you. You could of course try tidying up before she gets back, my guess is that would probably be well received. Or are you still not quite sure where things go outside the wine cellar?’

‘You know, even assuming you make an effort so you’re twice, no let’s say you’re even ten times nicer with them on the desk, than you are with me. Even then, I actually feel quite sorry for Will, putting up with you all day.’

‘What? So now you’re siding with him?’

‘Same way you side with Jane,’ he said in his most infuriating, gotcha, big brotherly way.

‘OK look, there’s one essential difference here. I’m not married to Will, perish the thought, so I owe him nothing beyond professional respect. As of today, as a matter of fact, I might even begin to grow one of those for him. You, by contrast, chose to go and marry Jane. So now she’s sick as a dog, and as her loving husband you're supposed to anticipate her needs and...’

‘Let me stop you right here, sis: real men don’t anticipate. That stuff is all rom-com bullshit. Real men act when there’s a need they can fill. No pun intended - I’d be so bloody lucky. I wish there was anything I could do about Jane's morning sickness, but there ain’t. Let’s be rational here for a second: it’s not my fault she’s sick and moody.’

Oh the idiot! At what point had he sneaked out for his sympathy bypass? 

Elisabeth was very good, she pictured Will’s finger tapping the marble tabletop in the atrium, remembered his advice, bit her tongue and tried to present her brother with a problem that he could, and would care to, solve:

‘Look, I’m sure it’s not much fun for you either. All I’m saying is, that your current attitude may not be the best suited to your tactical objectives. Jane’s pregnant, you have two kids, but you still want to watch the cricket: I’m afraid if you want the time off you need to be seen to be making an effort the rest of the time. It’s not that hard, really: clear up after dinner, give her couple of cuddles and the odd foot massage... it’ll take far less time than arguing with her, you’ll see, so in the end it might be more fun.’

‘Hmmm.’

‘Give it a go. Why don’t I come and babysit this weekend, take the kids off your hands while you give her a massage or something.’

‘A massage? I don’t know how to...’

‘Oh never mind, bro,’ she said, Will having just popped into her head again: ‘What real men don’t know, they just make up.’

xxx

The next couple of weeks were a lot easier, thankfully, if a lot busier too. There was her first ever hire to recruit; there was extending the spreadsheet to a myriad of European exchanges; there were meetings with VPN providers and meetings with data providers. 

‘Kudos, Lizzie, how did you pull that?’ Will said as she walked back to the desk one lunchtime and proudly presented him with a fifty grand invoice to sign off for two brand new UNIX servers. The machines were coming to them three weeks into a two months freeze on hardware changes, which Central IT had imposed ahead of Y2K testing on New Year's eve. Elisabeth, already very pleased with her victory over IT red-tape, now congratulated herself on getting Will to notice.

‘Oh I just flashed a bit of boob, you know, the usual,’ she joked, and saw his face freeze. Checking on Andy and Yoda over the screens revealed that their eyes too wore a thick glaze of shock. 

‘Oh the double standards in this place!’ she laughed, ‘I swear, if I down-tooled every time you guys go on about your bits.’ 

‘Fair cop,’ Yoda shrugged, and got back to work.

‘So what did you tell them?’ Will asked while he checked the invoice.

‘Nothing, I did that other thing, you know: listening?'

She saw him smile as he flicked the pages. 

It really hadn't been that hard: every geek knew that the basement-dwelling UNIX team were the bank's last true rebels. They were so excited about buying machines this fast, they'd all but fought over each other to break the IT freeze. 

'It’s bloody good kit, this, you know,' she said, 'More CPU than all the Pimms machines put together, live and dev both.’

‘You don’t say,’ Will said, nodding as he handed the invoice back to her. 

‘Luddite,’ she replied, sitting back down. 

Never mind Will: in a couple of weeks’ time she’d have at her sole disposal the fastest computers in the building’s server room.

And then the fun would really begin. 

xxx

But before the new servers came an overproduced, exuberant gig where Tom, under the cover of darkness, grabbed her by the waist, planted a kiss in her neck, let go and then proceeded to act for the rest of the evening as if nothing had happened. This was followed by emails, which in the time between the gig and Mac’s return from America took on an increasingly unprofessional turn. 

He was hating work, he seemed to hate all his colleagues bar one large placid Finn, and he hated calling the flat in the evening and getting through to Ben instead of her. On the couple of occasions when he “got ben’d”, however, it never seemed to occur to him to ask Ben to put her through. 

* * *

**From** : Tom Reilly <reilly_weerd@hotmail.com>

 **To** : Elisabeth R Bennet <er.bennet@_____.com>

Cc:

 **Subject** : Hawaii

 **Sent** : Fri, 29 October 10:42

Where the hell were you last night? Since when do you hang out with stockbrokers? That’s the kind of thing my dad does for fun. And remind me when we are going to Hawaii: I want to hear the lapping of the waves, and here all I hear is the unnatural buzzing of the e-ther and the endless tuneless clicking of keyboards, and to this I now return.

* * *

**From** : Elisabeth R Bennet <er.bennet@_____.com>

 **To** : Tom Reilly <reilly_weerd@hotmail.com>

Cc:

 **Subject** : Dispatches from the sell-side

 **Sent** : Fri, 29 October 11:01

In answer to your question about stockbrokers, according to the boss I need to “raise my profile with the sell-side” – that’s what we investment professionals call our stockbrokers. Last night they invited the desk to Le Coq d’Argent, which is very expensive and has a rooftop overlooking the Bank of England and the old Stock Exchange building . It'll make a great launch pad some day for a sell side professional looking to end their sad lives after a bad day on the markets. 

I contemplated taking the plunge a few times myself. You'd have loved the sales girls though. They'd brought not one but two in our honour. Both bottle blondes, both pneumatic, both functional alcoholics and both perched on 6-inch Louboutins. All skin-tight skirts and money-coloured-lipstick-smiles - I'd not felt that inadequate in a long time. Understandably they gave up on me at the word “quant": in commission terms us quants are worthless, plus we know nothing about statement footwear. 

The two of them obviously preferred to try and entertain Willy W. but, as we know, that is a hard and thankless task. They failed abjectly, though not for lack of throwing their cleavage around. I bailed out as early as I could but Andy has been all over Bloomberg this morning telling the world and his dog that he had both of them. 

Tom, these girls scare me more than any old boy ever did. For ruthlessness alone they deserve every penny they earn to spend on those Louboutins.

What else? A lot of football and inane TV talk, the odd mention of the market, and some displays of appalling manners towards our poor waiters, who smiled on and carried on serving about five grand’s worth of booze. So yes, I am sorry too that I missed your call, in more ways than one. 

Now, about Hawaii: sadly I’m busy until New Year's Eve, which I will spend in the office finding out what happens to my old research code when the Apocalypse strikes. I don’t believe anyone would care much about my old research code should that happen, but internal audit will sure have a field day. Next year perhaps? 

* * *

**From** : Tom Reilly <reilly_weerd@hotmail.com>

 **To** : Elisabeth R Bennet <er.bennet@_____.com>

Cc:

 **Subject** : RE: Dispatches from the sell-side

 **Sent** : Fri 29 October 11:10

What do I have to do to get a job on your desk?

* * *

Why thanks a bunch, Tom, she thought. Thanks for the sympathy, you should meet my brother. But instead of writing that she simply stopped emailing him for a bit, and got on with interviewing candidates for her new analyst position.

Her next email exchange with him was not until a few days and a few phone calls later.

* * *

**From** : Tom Reilly <reilly_weerd@hotmail.com>

 **To** : Elisabeth R Bennet <er.bennet@_____.com>

Cc:

 **Subject** : Check out the time stamp

 **Sent** : Tue, 02 November 09:02

Hey, I’m sure I’m terribly glad you’re so successful at executing everything around you executive style, just please don’t execute me, or your new French slave if and when he starts. And when you “go live” as you said last night -as if you were presently dead- and they pay you a bonus big enough to buy Oahu, will you pleeease take me to Hawaii? In the meantime yes, do send me the e-fish.

PS: Hope you’re impressed with the time stamp, cos that’s all the good that’s come of you hanging up on me at 9pm sharp to go off to bed. 

* * *

**From** : Elisabeth R Bennet <er.bennet@_____.com>

 **To** : Tom Reilly <reilly_weerd@hotmail.com>

Cc:

 **Subject** : e-fish

 **Sent** : Tue 02 November 12:35

Bet you just tampered with Outlook’s clock, I wouldn’t put it past you. Spent far too long looking for this, so please do enjoy.

Must run or will miss yoga. So you’re definitely coming Saturday for Mac’s welcome back thingy then?

* * *

**From** : Tom Reilly <reilly_weerd@hotmail.com>

 **To** : Elisabeth R Bennet <er.bennet@_____.com>

Cc:

 **Subject** : RE: e-fish

 **Sent** : Tue, 02 November 14:02

Back from boozy lunch with the Finn. He has a fascinating interior life, amounting almost to an entire alternative operating system. Must tell you all about it Saturday night. Why is your fish staring at me threateningly?

* * *

**From** : Elisabeth R Bennet <er.bennet@_____.com>

 **To** : Tom Reilly <reilly_weerd@hotmail.com>

Cc:

 **Subject** : RE: e-fish

 **Sent** : Wed, 03 November 07:05

Because you were pissed, is why. Better now?

* * *

**From** : Tom Reilly <reilly_weerd@hotmail.com>

 **To** : Elisabeth R Bennet <er.bennet@_____.com>

Cc:

 **Subject** : RE: E-fish

 **Sent** : Wed, 03 November 14:10

OK, you probably think I haven’t noticed but I have, and I do know that I’m only allowed to correspond once a day. If I were a betting man, like those lucky idiots you keep going on about, who get to sit at your pretty feet all day in your office, then I’d definitely say you’re not gonna reply to this ‘cos you’ve wasted your email for today already, but I’d also bet that you’ll be pleased to know that yes, I am better now. 

* * *

**From** : Elisabeth R Bennet <er.bennet@_____.com>

 **To** : Tom Reilly <reilly_weerd@hotmail.com>

Cc:

 **Subject** : RE: E-fish

 **Sent** : Thu 04 November 07:55

Oh good. 

* * *

**From** : Tom Reilly <reilly_weerd@hotmail.com>

 **To** : Elisabeth R Bennet <er.bennet@_____.com>

Cc:

 **Subject** : RE: E-fish

 **Sent** : Thu, 04 November 09:05

Will you stop it? We’re all out of synch now all because of you and I’ll have to wait until tonight for my fix. Don’t go anywhere and don’t let Ben near the phone and don’t email back first thing tomorrow morning with “yes” or something even terser. I wouldn’t put it past you.

* * *

**From** : Elisabeth R Bennet <er.bennet@_____.com>

 **To** : Tom Reilly <reilly_weerd@hotmail.com>

Cc:

 **Subject** : 160 words exactly, I checked

 **Sent** : Fri, 05 November 14:55

I know you’ll be thrilled to bits –that is if you ever resolve to make it in today- to know that I’ve had a most successful day thus far. My French slave, sorry “report”, Paul, did sign on. He starts next week, and Raj has created a new redundant gerund to celebrate our progress on tradePad: said our “interactings” with our “external stakeholders” were “stabilising extremely well”. Willy W. loves my new Europe spreadsheet. Well, his exact words were “Not bad, Lizzie.” But point is, he managed not to swear or sigh or interrupt or shake his head at me or take a phone call or cross his arms the whole time I took him through my new features. Even though the phone did actually ring. More than once. I know, you probably can’t believe it either, but it is true. This pleasant peaceful mood won’t last though, it’s time for our 3 o’clock with Toad. Wish me luck.

* * *

**From** : Tom Reilly <reilly_weerd@hotmail.com>

 **To** : Elisabeth R Bennet <er.bennet@_____.com>

Cc:

 **Subject** : Bring on the weekend

 **Sent** : Fri, 05 November 15:05

Just because our mail server has been down until now does not give you the right to punish me with an exhaustive narration of what you get up to with the most verbally challenged of your colleagues. And I didn’t think you needed new features, I like your old ones well enough. See them tomorrow?

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> copyright 2021 Mel Liffragh, all rights reserved.


	13. Mac's Party

Guy Fawkes’ night saw Mac’s return from his American odyssey. He was a little podgier than on his departure, his Mohawk a little shorter on top and longer on the sides: from a distance it might almost have passed for a normal haircut. And he had what he called a “whole new energy” about him, stemming from his reciprocated love for a dreadlocked modern dancer he’d met in Chicago. 

Within minutes of him dumping his bags in the lounge he had shown them a picture of a white faced, brown eyed girl, and a cherished crumpled flier for a performance of ‘Unsex me’ by the New Millennium Dance Company. The girl was unexpectedly good looking and, given her profession, probably very limber as well. But when Elisabeth thought about it some more it did make sense: by US frat boy standards Mac was still not that podgy and his posh English accent, so out of keeping with his general appearance here, must have had all the girls swooning over there. 

‘…and then she said, han han han,’ Elisabeth heard as she handed him the photo and flier back ‘ “’ave it large”, like she was trying to sound like our drummer, but of course she didn’t, and it was so funny...’

Elisabeth and Ben looked at each other. You probably had to be there.

‘So did you get any sleep on the flight?’ Elisabeth asked.

‘Naa, we had to take it in turn watching Bam.’

It took her a while to match the dimly remembered face of the skin-headed guitarist to his nickname, while Mac carried on:

‘They nearly turned him back at check in, he was sooooo plastered. He was sick, like, four times, han han, it was disgusting.’

‘I see, well sounds like you might want to get some sleep before tonight then,’ she said, and found herself poked in the ribs with the TV remote. Ah, so it was meant to be a surprise?

‘So what time is it there now?’ she asked rhetorically, looking at her watch, ‘Ten o’clock, minus five, is it?’

‘Minus six.’

‘Right, so you can definitely catch a couple of hours’ kip before you call her!’

‘Man, I need a shower… See you later,’ Mac replied, raising his mug to them as he headed out of the lounge. ‘Thanks guys, I’ve looked forward to this cup of tea sooooo much!’

Ben and Elisabeth smiled at him, then at each other, proud parents on the return of their prodigal son. 

‘So it’s a surprise?’

‘Was,’ Ben replied, and switched the kettle on. 

She swam, she shopped, she laundered, she cleaned the kitchen before and after baking, and finally she revived a great New York tradition: the party nap. She went down at five and didn’t get up again until she heard the first guests coming in and the music go on. Mac had taken the phone up to his room to call his girlfriend around four o’clock, and hadn’t been seen since. In that time, Ben had cleared the lounge and three shelves of the fridge, walked to Morrisson’s, walked back with a nicked trolley full of beer, and then duly returned the trolley. When she got into the lounge Bam, the skin-headed guitarist, was there with a petite redhead, presumably his girlfriend. The band’s manager came in next, dumped the keys to the Moonbus onto the kitchen worktop and grabbed himself a beer. Elisabeth walked over to Ben and complimented him on his party planning.

‘Should we go and get Mac?’

‘Wait ‘til more people are here.’

‘OK. And by the way, by “we” I meant “you”. I’m not going up there.’

‘Yes,’ he said, gravely: ‘Relax, have a beer, Tom will be here soon.’

‘Oh, cut it!’

She left him to go and get the door again. It was Bombshell and his incredibly pretty girlfriend. Elisabeth had no sooner dumped their coats than the doorbell went again, this time people she did not know, but instantly recognised as Mac’s brother, who turned out to go by the happy moniker of Eddie, plus one, who reminded her of those salesgirls at the Coq D’Argent. She got herself a glass of water –ice and lemon, to fend off ‘why aren’t you drinking’ questions- and carried on opening the door: the drummer with two blokes and a tall dreadlocked girl. Next came a whole gang - more friends of Ben and Mac’s from their Oxford days. Then someone turned up the volume on the stereo, and Mac eventually emerged, wearing only his trunks and manky vest. He stood there a while, then gasped with pleasure, said ‘Omygaaad’ like a true American princess, and ran back up to get dressed.

Lily Cheng walked in just as Mac vanished again. Despite having been back for months she still affected a Manhattanite accent:

‘Omygod, Elisabeth, thank goodness, izat-vodka? Canna have one!’ she said while wriggling out of her white faux-fur coat in the tiny hall. ‘Is Mark here?’ she added in a theatre whisper. 

Elisabeth had no idea who Mark might be, but if Lily was still a fraction as promiscuous as she’d been at college then these days she was probably cheating on one half of the room with the other half –girls included. Hence it was fair to assume that, whoever Mark was, Lily deserved to be made to think that he was indeed around tonight. Elisabeth decided this was as good a time as any to experiment with Will’s name-dropping technique:

‘Mark? I think I saw him talk to Bam's girlfriend, yes, why, is that a problem?’

‘I need to mak’a call? Canna go d’y’r room?’ Lily asked, and went without waiting for the answer. 

Elisabeth set herself to rifling through the kitchen for some vodka, and in the end found half a bottle left at the back of a cupboard. She poured some over lots of ice, figuring Lily was man enough to have it neat, since Ben had not catered for girlie mixers. Lily got back a moment later and grabbed her glass.

‘Wow, thanks!’ she said after a greedy gulp. 

Elisabeth nodded and shoved what was left of the bottle into the freezer. 

‘So how are you, darlin’? ’sbeen awhile.’

‘OK, thanks, yeah, you?’

‘How’s your love life?’

None of your business, thought Elisabeth.

‘You caught any of these guys yet?’ Lily asked, circling her glass-holding index finger around the room. Elisabeth shook her head with an indifferent pout at the floor. 

‘Not your scene?’

Something made Elisabeth look up then, and she found that Tom had got in, and stood in the doorframe his bright eyes all over her. She looked back at the carpet, stupidly pleased with herself, but Lily had found time to turn around, wave at Tom and turn back to Elisabeth, and she hadn’t missed a beat. 

‘Yes, that makes sense,’ she said, nodding her head. ‘You like him too, right?’

‘What do you mean I like him too?’

‘He’s alright. He likes you.’

A horrible thought flashed through Elisabeth’s mind: all those nobodies that Tom and Sara had never not been unfaithful to, with each other – could they include Lily? She frowned, and a loud cheer erupted as Mac re-entered the room, fully dressed:

‘Is that Mac? Ohmagod he’s got even fatter!’

You want to be saying this a bit louder, thought Elisabeth. They were standing across the line between the kitchen’s lino and the lounge’s carpet, Elisabeth on the lino looking into the room, Lily facing the kitchen. Lily lit up, and offered her a Marlborough Light. She accepted it, grateful for something to do other than keep checking whether Tom was going to come her way, which he wasn’t. She lit her fag on Lily’s, and when she looked up she found that Tom was staring at her, this time from a couple of yards away, over the front of Bombshell’s head and the back of Lily’s. She didn’t look down, but gave him a friendly wave and a smile, both of which were returned, before he went back to talking to his friend.

OK, play it cool if that’s what you like, she thought, and gave a little shrug before looking back down at Lily. 

‘And how’s work?’ Lily asked.

‘All right. Interesting. Steep learning curve, these days.’

‘I know, Will was saying.’

‘What?’ she cried before she realised that, surely, she must have jumped to the wrong conclusion. She took a drag to steady herself, but she had forgotten that she’d stopped smoking so it sent her into a coughing fit instead. When it passed she was able to ask, a fraction more calmly:

‘Sorry, what Will were you talking about?’

‘Will Kingsley. You know…’ Lily raised her eyebrows then blew smoke over her shoulder.

‘Too right, I do,’ Elisabeth said, peering through the smoke at Lily’s flat, moon-round face. ‘Lily, is there anyone but anyone that you don’t know?’

‘Oh no, it’s just he used to row with this guy I’m sort of seeing, we all went out a couple of times.’

‘I see. Good for you,’ she said with a curt nod and pursed lips. Lily smiled and started again with a knowing look:

‘I knew he meant you as soon as he said he’d interviewed with some scary French bird with glasses.’

‘Great. You don’t actually have to tell me this, you know.’

‘ ’said you were all right, actually.’

‘I’m sure he was being polite.’

‘Oh no, that’s right: he said you were great entertainment value.’

Entertainment value? 

‘I’m pretty sure he meant it as a compliment.’

‘Really? Well that’s the worst part.’ 

Elisabeth remembered to stop halfway through taking her cigarette back to her lips. She let her hand drop back down: entertainment value? Seriously? Patronising git. Entertainment value? Was that what he called getting those servers off of the UNIX team in the middle of an IT freeze? Was decrypting the bloody Reuters feed for level-two order book data what he called “entertainment value”? She was frowning into the mid distance, damning Willy Wanker and all his fellow male chauvinistic pigs to hell eternal when Tom caught her eye, raised a quizzical eyebrow, blew smoke at the ceiling and gave her a smile. 

‘Well, I suppose that’s just like him,’ Elisabeth said. She wasn’t at all sure who she was talking about anymore, but she did know this: that she wanted to discuss neither Will nor Tom with Lily Cheng. 

‘So tell me,’ she said, ‘Who’s this guy you’re “sort of seeing”?’ 

‘Dean?’

‘Dean, that’s unusual.’

Why was it ringing a bell? Nothing came to her:

‘So anyway, what’s he like?’ she asked.

‘Dishy. They both are, actually, aren’t they?’

‘I’ve never met Dean and somehow I don’t look at Will that way.’

‘Dean’s fair though. You know how I like that.’

Elisabeth had no idea and cared even less.

‘Point is, these guys look after themselves, knowaddamean? They dress properly, they exercise. Not like this lot,’ Lily added with a dismissive nod back at the unkempt crowd behind her.

Elisabeth knew exactly what Lily meant: in practice, she meant that going for a run or to the gym was what they simply had to do whenever they didn’t want to talk about data vendors with scary French birds with glasses. She felt she had to mount a riposte on behalf of the rest of the room:

‘Ben plays footy two nights a week.’

‘I know. He’s cute! Do you _like_ him?’

‘Who cares? How did you meet this Dean guy then?’

‘At the screening of this short I wrote you about.’

Elisabeth remembered an email inviting her, along with half of London, somewhere trendy in Islington. She'd figured she wouldn't be missed. 

‘His brother’s one of the VCs behind the production company,’ Lily said.

Brother a venture capitalist, financing poncey films, rower, friend of Will’s: she loved this Dean guy already. Not.

‘So what does he do?’

‘He’s at this hedge fund in equities... or is it arbitrage? Global… something or other.’

Ping! went the penny as it dropped, and with a twist of revulsion Elisabeth’s mind relived that awful meeting with Will and Toad. Dean: unusual name indeed. Lily was “sort of seeing” Will’s go-to friend for the purposes of corporate storytelling. Given the fact he’d suggested she used Charlotte to do the same, they must be thick as thieves. If that was the case then this Dean, whoever he was, probably deserved all he was about to get for “sort of seeing” Lily Cheng but still, it was awkward. 

And now Elisabeth’s cigarette was out and there was no prop for her to use to regain her countenance, so of course now was also the precise moment Tom chose to check her out again. Bother.

‘So are you guys serious?’ Elisabeth asked, raising her eyebrows and inclining her head, as she imagined someone might do, who gave a monkey’s.

‘Naaa…’ Lily shook her head, drawing the corners of her mouth down. ‘Slept with him a couple of times. Nice enough guy, loaded...’

‘Sure,’ Elisabeth nodded, as if this kind of stuff happened to her all the time. ‘Would you excuse me for a minute?’ she said, and took off for the loo without waiting for an answer. 

The one off the corridor was busy, so she went to her room. She gathered herself for a minute, and dumped her sweater on the futon. Either the animal heat in the lounge had risen fast, or it was just Lily’s choice of conversation and Tom’s flirty glances, but she was boiling. She washed her hands, splashed her face and realised that, luckily, it looked less drawn since the nap. She took a deep breath and pushed up the sleeves of her top, and heard the faint mournful chords of “Baby bitch” coming from across the wall. Nice song, yep, pretty much summed Lily up. Like most truly doleful numbers it actually made Elisabeth smile, so she gave herself a friendly slap on the cheek and got out again, through her room and into the corridor, humming ‘baby, baby, baby bitch’ until lost in thoughts she bumped into something by the lounge door. It took an unquantifiable moment for her to realise that the thing was Tom, that she had her back to the wall, and that he was holding the sides of her head so tight he was hurting her where the branches of her glasses dug into her temples, and straining her neck up to kiss her. 

He was kissing her a lot. Breathlessly. One big hungry mouth he had, his lips cold from his last beer bottle, his chest burning and thumping against hers. Her own hands found their way up to the sides of his neck, and with the tips of her fingers she felt the stubbly skin around his jaw line. There was a flash of light as the door opened from the lounge. “Baby Bitch” got louder, and a space opened in front of her face as he turned away to look at – was it Ben’s face? She couldn’t be sure. The figure backed out and the door closed. First Tom’s chest then his arms peeled away, and then he disappeared altogether. 

Elisabeth leant her head back against the corridor wall, gasping for air, praying that whoever it was wouldn’t open that door again just yet. Pebbles were dropping to the pit of her stomach, rolling turning and grinding. She closed her eyes and felt her lips tingle, and waited for her breathing to settle. The flash of light and song returned and she turned to face it, and walked back into the lounge. 

In the brighter light of the room she wondered which one of these faces would now be staring at her with greedy curiosity, or whether just everyone could guess. Tom was already standing way back near the window, talking to Lily and Ben. Perhaps he too looked a bit absent. She made for the kitchen, keeping her eyes down. What now? Get Mac going on about his new girlfriend to pass the time? Or would Tom perhaps, just perhaps, come over and talk about it this time? She looked his way again. Nope? OK, fair enough.

She tried Mac, who did indeed kill a good half hour, and what was left of Elisabeth’s will to live. 

‘She’ll be done after the New Year’s Eve performance, and she’s already looking for jobs over here. We’ve started sending her _resume_ ,’ he said in fluent American. Whatever. Someone changed the music to something she recognised from that last gig they’d been to and it made her smile, though under her ribs rocks were still tumbling in a backwash of anxiety. A smoke was handed to Mac and she grabbed it from him before he could take a drag. It was good and green, grassy, and started rasping on her tongue before she’d had time to exhale. She took another two greedy puffs, closed her eyes and kept it in as long as she could, then handed the rollie back to Mac and exhaled, waiting for her lips to stop tingling with memories. At least Mac had stopped talking, that was a result. He looked surprised, so it couldn’t have been him in the sudden flash of light at the door. Her stomach constricted further, and jagged painfully. 

‘Excuse me a minute,’ she said, making for the kitchen, and checking the clock above the oven. Tom had been stood there chatting to Ben and Lily for almost forty minutes. She tipped her now tepid water into the sink and waited for the drummer to clear away from the fridge door. She opened the freezer: Lily hadn’t finished the vodka, good. She poured herself a full glass, shaking the last drops out of the bottle. She stared at the glass for a minute with her back turned to the room, then squeezed her eyes shut, tilted her head back and downed it. It scorched its way down to her stomach and made the rocks there burn and grate as they turned. Then she drank two more glasses of water, filled up a third and walked straight up to Tom.

Half an hour after that she glimpsed at the time on the alarm clock next to her futon. Tom’s chest was still burning hot but this time hers was too, and the air around them was cooler than it had felt in the corridor. His hands were not clasping quite so hard around her head, they were rummaging through her hair and she occasionally had to take her hands off him to push strands back and away from their mouths. His hair was prickly where it was shorter at the top of his neck, and damp with sweat where it was longer towards the forehead. His lips left her mouth to burrow into her neck and she let her head drop to one side and stroked his hair back over his head. She pulled him closer to her, running her fingers under his collar between his shoulder blades, making him shudder. His skin, like his hair, was damp. It felt a little coarse under her fingers. His head came back up and searched for her mouth again. She smiled and reached for his. They parted again, and he stared at her, still holding on to the sides of her head. 

‘Let’s take our shoes off, you’ve pulled,’ he announced with mock solemnity. His voice broke in the middle. She smiled again, but the smile left her with his hands, and they both sat on the side of her low bed, pulling at the laces of their matching DM boots. He finished first and yanked at her left shoe, laughing a beautiful boyish laugh as he dumped it with flourish onto a heap with his, then threw her discarded sweater on top. 

Outside the room doors closed and opened, and the lounge’s noises ebbed and flowed as they did. Elisabeth got up to turn the key in her lock, glanced at the pile of boots and thought, disturbingly, about a photo on the fridge in the old flat, of hers and Mike’s in a similar heap at the top of Helvellyn on a beautiful, long gone summer’s day. Tom too was staring at the shoes, and she tried not to think whose DMs he was thinking about. She sat back next to him at the foot of the bed and this time she had to make a much more conscious decision to put her arm around his waist. 

Her hand started furling up the bottom of his shirt, looking for skin. He turned and pulled them both down onto the hard bed. They winced, they giggled, and then they went back to kissing, and to taking each other’s tops off for the first time, which was excellent fun, so she took her time over it. Their tops were halfway up their torsoes, their tummies too skinny to touch, hers soft under his wandering hands, a thin crest of jet-black hair running tantalisingly down his. Their belts kept digging into their hipbones as they tried to get even closer. She helped him undo her bra, and gasped when his cold hand touched her breast. He smiled hungrily and buried his head in her neck with a moan. She bit her bottom lip, ignored a lurch in her stomach and snuck a hand under the waist of his boxers.

Fifteen minutes later he was sitting on the sill of the French doors with his long bare back turned to her, staring at his wiggling toes and smoking, his jeans pulled up but not buttoned. He was on his third fag: this was how long she’d had her head down the toilet. 

She’d started retching after only a couple of forgettable thrusts, and disappeared as soon as he’d finished which, luckily, had taken barely another minute. Now she put a t-shirt on and came to kneel behind him, and placed a hand on the back of his head. 

‘You OK?’ she asked.

He didn’t move. He didn’t say anything. The door was too narrow for two to sit there, and embracing his sunken chest was awkward, but she tried. It was freezing. Soon she begun to shiver, and let go.

An hour later he was sleeping face down on her bed, half naked, and she was wondering whether her stomach would hold out now, or whether she’d have to go and puke out yet more of her stony gut. Her last drink of water had come right back out, and the fevered rumble in her now empty stomach was incredibly painful. But my, he was beautiful. She could still hear some music next door, someone had got a guitar out; there was laughter. 

At four o’clock she opened an eye and realised she must have slept after all. She also realised that it hadn’t been a dream: Tom was here. She smiled as she saw his outline next to her under the duvet. She rolled over and pressed her achy, crampy tummy to his warm flank. It felt better, but soon he rolled over to his side, his back to her, with a sleepy grunt. Her hands were ice cold and she didn’t dare touch him, though he was so temptingly warm. 

Her mind went back to the picture of him earlier on the windowsill. What or who had he been thinking of? Like too many women in love, Elisabeth started painting her own paranoid thoughts inside her lover’s head. She had disappointed him. In fact it was a miracle she hadn’t put him off altogether, and there was no possible doubt in her mind that the moment he’d turned over and she’d disappeared into the loo his thoughts must have returned to his mythical, perfect, unavailable Sara. 

At 7:30am she woke again, and again was surprised that she’d managed to sleep. There was no one beside her now, and she lay for a while thinking hard whether Tom had ever really been there. In the end she had to drag herself out of bed and check the windowsill. There were a bunch of fag-butts there, so perhaps it hadn’t been a dream. She pulled her jeans on and went into the lounge. A couple of bodies were asleep there, but Tom was nowhere to be seen. What now? She needed food or she was going to pass out. She found some bread and took a heap of marmalade toast back to her room. She was asleep again after three bites, and finished her breakfast in bed a couple of hours later when she woke up again. Then she had a shower and headed back to the lounge, still hoping she might find Tom there.

xxx

She knew something was wrong the moment she pushed the door from the corridor. Ben and Mac looked first at her, then, ominously, at each other. They explained as gently as they could that Tom was by now on an aeroplane on its way to Tallinn, Estonia, where he would be working through to Christmas. 

They were 100% British about it, in the nicest possible way: Mac looked down at his feet when he spoke and cleared his throat a lot, while Ben faced the cooker throughout, concluding Mac’s speech by presenting her with a perfect cup of steaming black coffee. In the circumstances, she couldn’t have asked for more. 

Past the initial shock she wasn’t actually that surprised. This was classic Tom: he’d told her all about his Finnish colleague’s dietary habits, and nothing about his job. He’d spoken much about Sara without giving away anything of substance. And he’d told her plenty about their fantasy trip to Hawaii, but nothing about this real one. It was Tom’s way: without material needs to fulfil he had probably never needed to plan around anything or anyone in his life, nor indeed to clog up his elegant mind with “busy nothings” such as work trips to Estonia.

The more she thought about it, the more Elisabeth saw reasons to take heart. First and best of all, she now knew what he’d been hiding, out on her windowsill. There was a good chance that their first shag, short as it had been, had given him dark thoughts not about Sara, but about Tallinn. Wasn’t that just as likely, yet a lot less threatening? There was also a good chance that this trip was why he’d not made a proper move on her earlier. There was an excellent chance, in fact, that he’d been planning on saving it until the New Year. In hindsight that might have been a better idea all around but then hindsight, as every quant knows, is a wonderful thing.

Besides, even by Sunday evening, Saturday night still did not feel quite real. She’d either forgotten or not consciously experienced much of it. Perhaps that was best: after so many weeks of tension, build up and first class flirting the sex would have had to be out of this world not to come as a bit of an anti-climax. She couldn’t even say whether what they’d done really qualified as a shag. But she was pretty sure that it was something which, the morning after, would have required either an awkward chat, or an enthusiastic re-match. And now she’d have to wait until the New Year to find out which. Good job then that where Tom was concerned she was if anything too well versed in self-restraint by now.

***

It was however unfortunate for Paul Delanoé, Pimms identifier PD01, that he’d chosen the following Monday to join the bank. He must have thought his new boss incapable of focus as she kept abandoning him to go and check her emails, and for the first two days kept returning with nothing but loud sighs. 

Paul looked all prim and preppy in beige chinos and a light blue Oxford shirt. According to his CV he was three years older and about ten times more intelligent than Elisabeth. He’d spent three years playing with Europe’s largest particle accelerator, then the next two at MIT in Boston. He seemed really cuddly, for a particle physicist. Babyish, even. Perhaps it was the French schoolboy haircut, thick and smooth with a very neat left side parting. Perhaps it was the flawless skin and the close shave. Most likely it was all of those, plus his very un-British habit of smiling a lot. 

By day three Elisabeth knew that she was in the presence of programming genius: Paul had not only finished installing the US code on the new UK machine, he had also installed tradePad’s software and managed to get it to open up. As he did so he let out a small shriek of entirely justified excitement, nonetheless eyebrows all over the desk started to migrate North _en masse_. 

Paul seemed to spend a lot of time on the phone, talking in a strange voice. Elisabeth knew that people could sound different in different languages: apparently she, for instance, was less shrill in English than in French. But Paul’s high-pitched cry was weird even taking linguistics into account. Then at 11 o’clock there was a delivery for him, of pink-blush lilies. 

No one dared ask, but the word GAY was on everyone’s mind. Especially as he’d chosen that day to wear a pastel pink shirt. And he was so happy about his flowers that his voice went up an extra pitch when he next spoke French on the phone. 

By far the best thing about it was how hard Andy had to try not to ogle him over the top of Newbie’s head when Paul went on like that. As for Elisabeth, she had quit wondering on day one, when over lunch Paul had told her far more than she wanted to hear about his boyfriend in Paris. They’d been together for five years and had a thoroughbred greyhound called Cher. Now that quarantine laws had been relaxed, Cher and the boyfriend would soon be moving to London (cue photo of a skinny greying man and matching grey dog, in matching studded leather collars). It was going to be great because people were so much more open minded here. Ah yes, she thought, perhaps down the Admiral Duncan in Soho on a Friday night, but around this trading desk?

Since he’d done such a great job she sent Paul home early and the minute he’d left all the traders turned to her with eager eyes. She pretended not to notice and started to ask Neil about an expensive trade in British American Tobacco in the week’s transaction cost report. Andy logged off for the day, put his coat on, and cleared his throat:

‘So, Lizzie, is he, or what?’

‘Is who? What?’

‘Well, Paul!’ said Newbie. 

‘Is he what? French? Yes, definitely.’

‘Is that what they call it these days?’ Will cracked next to her, and the boys all duly laughed. She had to bite her lip not to follow suit, and was not at all sure she could carry on pretending not to get it. But there was fun in trying:

‘Well, you know, I’m just not sure. He hasn’t said anything, but I think you might be right.’ 

The boys looked at each other: they weren’t buying it, but nor could they press her further. 

‘Why don’t you ask him if you’re not sure?’ she said to Andy. ‘But in the meantime, you guys might want to watch your mouths a bit, just in case.’

Andy grumbled something and took off.

‘Oh, and watch your emails too, Will. Just so you know, Paul has been added to the ‘UK Equity Trading’ distribution list.’

She watched Will frown and turn back to his screens, then turning to hers she saw it, topping a very good day already, Tom’s first despatch from Estonia:

* * *

**From** : Tom Reilly <reilly_weerd@hotmail.com>

 **To** : Elisabeth R Bennet <er.bennet@___.com>

Cc:

 **Subject** : Dispatches from the hell side.

 **Sent** : Wed, 10/11/2009 20:23

For four days I’ve been wondering whether you are feeling better, and whether I really could have been so underwhelming that shagging me literally made you sick? You might as well tell me, it’s hell out here without you anyway. 

* * *

**From** : Elisabeth R Bennet <er.bennet@___.com>

 **To** : Tom Reilly <reilly_weerd@hotmail.com>

Cc:

 **Subject** : Dispatches from the buy side.

 **Sent** : Wed, 10/11/2009 17:25

It wasn’t you, it was the vodka! And perhaps Mac’s weed too, a little bit. Anyway now you’ll never try and get me pissed again. 

But I’m fine now, thank you. Much better than fine for reading you. So hang in there and then please _please_ get back here, I miss you too.

* * *

All of a sudden life was looking great again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> copyright 2021 Mel Liffragh, all rights reserved.


	14. Marshmallows, a cigar and a spa

How on earth had Elisabeth ended up perched on her high heels in this ridiculous tight shirt, walking a gigantic silver bowl of pink and white marshmallows towards a chocolate fountain at the Berkeley Hotel?

The hotel had been hired by one of their brokers to host Christmas drinks and the outfit was Charlotte’s idea, who else? She’d insisted that Elisabeth “smarten up” for her second broker outing. The heels were alright: Elisabeth’s only pair but danced-through and comfortable. She’d never worn them with trousers before but they worked, made her legs look longer in her only pair of skinnies, which was nice. The shirt, however, was a mistake. It was a boob-hugging blue-stripe lycra-enhanced number which Mike, in one of his moments of sartorial ineptitude, had bought her for her birthday a few years back. She knew why Mike liked it and that was the reason she never wore it: it made her B-and-a-half cups stick out far too conspicuously and Elisabeth, unlike Sarah Atkinson, did not enjoy people talking to her chest. In fairness to Charlotte though, what she had accomplished tonight was nothing short of a styling miracle: she had managed to dress her up as an almost convincing salesgirl whilst only using Elisabeth’s own clothes. 

As for the mountain of marshmallows, well, that was the guys’ idea of a joke and she had to hand it to them, it was a good one. A perfect double joke served both on their quant and their broker, i.e. on the two brands of professionals they most loved to hate. 

None more so than the broker hosting tonight, who had such a large share of the Alternative Investment Market that they could charge whatever they liked. Since neither Andy nor Yoda, nor indeed anyone in attendance tonight, could therefore afford to cut their line, that broker did indeed charge a lot. In return Andy and Yoda had turned up tonight determined, like every year, to make a nuisance of themselves in every possible way. 

Andy, a lager drinker, had kept everyone on five hundred quid a pop Cristal and Krug all night while Master Yoda, who did not eat fish, had sent for half a dozen different trays of sushi, only to send each of them back – not before Elisabeth had enjoyed some rare treats. 

It hadn’t been too bad an evening to start with: she’d consumed raw fish and fine champagne she estimated to be worth about a week’s salary to the median British household, and then she’d headed towards the chocolate fountain for dessert. 

‘Yum! Shame they don’t have any marshmallows,’ she’d said without thinking as she chomped on a chocolate covered strawberry, and Andy’s little eyes had lit up with a spark of pure evil. 

So now between the heels, the tight shirt and the avalanche of marshmallows on her hands she was attracting rather more attention than she was comfortable with. With all British inhibitions washed away in a torrent of overpriced booze, both she and the marshmallow mountain had been propositioned many times _en route_. 

This was only marginally worse than the average Saturday night in Paris, of course, so Elisabeth just blanked every one out and walked on until there were only a few steps between her and the chocolate fountain. A few more steps and she’d dump this stupid silver bowl and walk back away in more dignified anonymity.

‘Excuse me, may I help you with that?’ she heard behind her. Which was perfectly polite and the man didn’t sound particularly inebriated but, extrapolating from her experience thus far, Elisabeth lumped him in with the other drunken chancers and ignored him together with a couple more suggestive winks from complete strangers. 

There, she’d arrived at last, having lost no more than perhaps a dozen marshmallows along the way. But now the table supporting the fountain was covered in dishes of fruit and she didn’t have a free hand to push any of them and make space for her stupid bowl of marshmallows. She couldn’t see a waiter anywhere within shouting distance; people were squishing and squashing around her; some started helping themselves from the top of the heap and she feared the whole edifice might soon collapse all over her. She fantasised about chucking it all into the fountain and doing a runner, but for now she kept ducking and weaving and watching her sides as grey suits pushed and shoved. 

She’d just had another close shave when someone pointed her to a gap he must have cleared for her between the alien mutant Christmas strawberries, and a largely untouched heap of kumquats. Moses could not have felt more relieved when the waters of the Red Sea parted before him. 

‘There you go, better?’ the voice from earlier asked.

‘Thank you, very kind,’ she said, and blushed as she realised that the last man she’d blanked out was in fact her saviour, and that he had been perfectly sober and well intentioned. In fact, he must have been the only person this whole evening to have shown more interest in her welfare than in her stripy chest or her marshmallows. 

‘What’s with all this? May I try one?’ he asked. 

He was strikingly fair in a uniquely British way. Almost consumptively so. His skin was all but translucent and his hair, thin and unkempt, was so blond that his eyebrows were barely discernible above his light grey eyes. But with all that he was a nice looking man and, more importantly, he seemed a nice man. 

‘Try one, you kidding? Now we’ve got them here you may as well have as many as you like,’ Elisabeth said, grabbing two skewers and handing him one. ‘Please, be my guest!’

‘Thank you,’ he said, smiling, and they each took a handful and waited for an opening around the chocolate fountain. ‘So how did you end up with those?’

‘It’s a long story.’

‘A funny one?’

‘I’m still not sure.’

‘Why not?’

‘Are here you here as client, or as host?’

‘Client, why?’

Elisabeth explained how around ten thirty in the evening a drunken Andy had sent the head of their host’s entire European Sales operation on an “urgent” errand to find her some marshmallows. Lots of marshmallows. Only Haribo ones. He’d been very specific: the marshmallows must fill this entire huge bowl, with as much again sticking out of the bowl. 

‘They do something along those lines every year, apparently,’ she said, ‘They complain about something trivial and send the most senior person they can find on the most stupid errand they can think of. Doing the salesgirls is not enough you see, at Christmas they like to humiliate the top brass.’

Her companion’s smile was the perfect mix of sympathy and amusement. 

‘But this year they got a double whammy because they specifically asked the guy to give _me_ the stupid marshmallows, so they got to make fun of the top brass _and_ the desk quant. Genius, don’t you think?’

The man looked away, clearly too polite to laugh at Elisabeth’s expense. There was a gentle diffidence about his whole fair person, an obvious aversion to causing offense, which reminded Elisabeth of all that was best in Jane. 

‘You aren’t angry with them then?’ he asked.

‘Naaah, come on: it was funny! Plus it serves me right for being such a greedy-guts in the first place. No, believe me, this is much better than being ignored.’

The man allowed himself a frown of incomprehension.

‘Two months ago they would never have dared take the mickey out of me directly,’ Elisabeth explained, ‘so I’m kind of glad that nowadays they feel they can. No, it’s this poor sales guy I feel sorry for, scouring Mayfair in the middle of the night for forty packs of marshmallows.’

‘Poor sales guy? Isn’t that a bit of an oxymoron? Especially tonight: they’re an expensive house. Everyone’s here to punish their entertainment budget.’

‘So I gather. But even assuming that they’re, what, even 5 bips more expensive than they should be?’

He shrugged.

‘Then every time you do a hundred mil with them - which takes a while on AIM - that’s fifty grand you’ve overpaid. Does that give you the right to send a grown man hunting for marshmallow in the middle of the night?’

‘Do you enjoy being a quant then?’ the man asked, smilingly avoiding her question.

‘I do, yes,’ she nodded, ‘but sometimes even I can’t get to the right number. I mean how much exactly do you reckon makes it all right to be this rude to your host? Ten grand, fifty grand, six figures?’

‘Me? I’m not sure there is such a number -but I seem to be in a minority.’

‘Minority of two,’ she said, holding out her hand. ‘Nice to meet you, I’m Elisabeth Bennet, I’m with ––––.’

‘I thought so,’ the man said, and with three little words suddenly went from really nice to downright creepy. She dropped his hand like a hot potato and he started pointing at his glasses and at the region below his left ear. 

‘It’s the... Sorry, I should have said, I’m Dean,’ he said, bravely extending his hand again. She looked down at it: “Dean” was still creepy. What gave some “Dean” the right to get familiar with her?

‘Dean Fitzwilliam,’ he persevered, ‘I work at Sankuro? I’m...’ 

At last it came to her:

‘Dean, _now_ I’ve got you! So sorry! You work at Sankuro in made-up trading systems! But you used to row with Will Kingsley and now you go running with him, right?’

Dean nodded and she was surprised at how relieved she felt, that he wasn’t a creep after all. Not that she couldn’t deal with one more creep in this room tonight, but it would have been a disappointment: she’d quite liked this Dean Fitzwilliam, on first impressions. But how come he'd known her by her hair and glasses and, even more baffling, how was someone as nice as he seemed to be any friend of Will's?

‘Thanks for taking him running by the way. He’s normally in a much better mood afterwards.’

‘Glad to be of service, Elisabeth – or should I call you Lizzie?’

‘Definitely not Lizzie,’ she said without thinking. Damn, that was the problem with considerate people, they lulled you into a false sense of security until you forgot to watch herself for a second and then:

‘Look I... I didn’t mean that. Well I kind of did but ... don’t say anything, please. It’s fine. As nicknames go I get off lightly, really. It’s just that Lizzie Bennet is a lot to live up to, these days, don’t you think?’

Dean smiled: 

‘Elisabeth, then. I believe I’ve been dating a friend of yours?’

Dean’s eyes, which had so far looked polite but diffident, lit up as he spoke of Lily, and this unchecked display of excitement did more to endear him to Elisabeth, than had all his previous solicitude. She had never thought, when Lily Cheng had mentioned this friend of Will’s she was “sort of seeing”, that she would ever feel sorry for the guy, but here she was, doing precisely that. 

Meanwhile all manners of inappropriate retorts to “I believe I’ve been dating a friend of yours” came to her along the lines of “Well, that’s what _you_ think” and “Good luck to you then”, but none that she could bring herself to utter to someone as undeserving of them as Dean Fitzwilliam. 

‘Of course, Lily!’ she said, her voice straining.

‘Did she...’

‘Of course! She did tell me about you, yes, last time I saw her: she did!’

This time her voice didn’t break but she nodded rather more vigorously than was warranted. Dean, bless him, was far too enraptured to notice, hanging on to her every word. She could tell he was at that stage of early infatuation where he would have lapped up every last mundane detail she could have dredged up about Lily: flossing routine, childhood pet's birthdate, favourite crisp flavour... But Elisabeth did not have the heart to lead him on:

‘I only shared a hall with her for a year at college. To be honest with you I’d lost touch with her until a couple of months ago. I guess she’s not the sort of person you forget though, is she?’

He shook his lovelorn head, and her heart went out to him again. Why did Lily have to go and mess up the last decent single heterosexual male in the City _as well_? Typical. She really would have to have a word.

‘She should be joining us any time,’ Dean said. 

‘Right, that’ll be nice. Oh look, there’s Will! D’you think he’s seen us?’ 

Another thing she would never have anticipated was that she would find herself longing for Will’s company at a social but here she was: anything to move the conversation away from Lily Cheng. Dean Fitzwilliam waved at Fitzwilliam Kingsley Darcy, made the international hand-sign for “drink”, received a thumbs-up back, and when he spoke to Elisabeth again his eyes had resumed their earlier expression of polite diffidence. 

‘Are you getting used to him yet?’

‘Hmmm, exactly how good a friend of yours is he?’ she joked.

‘The best: we met our first week at college.’

‘Wow, really?’ 

She frowned, but then it begun to make sense. Dean must be the only person on this earth with enough kindness, patience and diplomatic skill to get under Will’s emotional armour plating. 

‘I’ve rowed with him, run with him, worked with him: he’s the best. Just think of him shaving his head for charity…’

‘Hang on, is that why he did it?’

‘He never told you?’

She shook her head.

‘Our PA’s son, back at Belmont, was diagnosed with leukaemia. Will raised over five grand in the end - and the brokers had a laugh doing it. I can’t believe he didn’t tell you?’

‘It didn’t come up, I suppose. Good for him though - is the kid OK?’

‘Alive…’ Dean said, dropping his happy front for a second. But only for a second:

‘I’m intrigued,’ he said, ‘what on earth did you think when Will showed up cueballed for his interviews? That he was a Buddhist?’

She laughed. 

‘No, I never would have accused him of that. I just thought he was… unusual,’ she said, catching herself in time. 

‘And now?’

Now? Let’s see: how to put this? 

Back in research Elisabeth used to be known as pig-headed. Whereas now in trading, and with the tradePad project turning into a daily battle against recalcitrant or plain incompetent data vendors, brokers and IT guys, the same trait had been rebranded as determination. So Elisabeth’s fighting spirit, being more than a match for Will’s, had finally gained her his professional respect. She would of course much rather he respected her for being a good quant than for being pig-headed, but it was a start. 

Conversely, and although it wouldn’t have been right to say this to Dean, Will had risen in her estimation since he’d pulled her into room 3.11 one morning, and asked her in great secrecy to conjure up some numbers to back Neil’s promotion. Neil was smart, generous, hard-working, and had been her only ally when she’d first joined the desk. She would gladly have done the numbers for nothing but Will had provided an extra incentive, in the form of daily morning macchiatos from a proper coffee shop. 

Elisabeth had never stopped to ask herself whether Will would rather she’d respected him for being a good trader rather than for sharing her interest in Neil’s career and strong coffee but again, it was a start. 

‘You know what,’ Elisabeth said to Dean in the end, punctuating her speech with an affirmative tip of her marshmallow skewer, ‘actually he’s alright, these days.’

‘What a ringing endorsement!’

‘Sorry, did I just damn with faint praise?’ 

‘Quite possibly,’ said Dean, though he did not look the least bit offended. 

‘I didn’t mean to.’

‘But he does say you’re very hard to please.’

‘Am I?’

‘I don’t know. You seem easy going enough. Especially given the marshmallows.’

‘Oh those weren’t Will’s idea but thank you. Naaa, we’re doing fine these days, Will and I, honest.’

She had spoken from the heart, only she had kept to herself the one thing that still did bother her: the fact that deep down she knew Will didn’t like her, and never would. He had far too much self-control to let on these days, of course, and they’d even shared a number of friendly enough chats over their morning coffees. But most of the time even these ended with him serving her his trademarked death-stare for no reason she could fathom. And although she’d never feared it she’d much prefer to be spared his disapproval, especially at quarter past seven in the morning when she was usually happy and smiling and just looking up from one of Tom’s lovely emails. 

Seriously, why did Will have to disapprove of fun? With the exception of fun at her expense, of course, but then she’d actually managed not to screw up for a while now, so she hoped her “entertainment value” was going down. Point was: it was one thing for Will not to allow himself any fun, but quite another for him to look down on those who did. Unfortunately there was no amount of early morning double macchiatos that could ever make up for that kind of attitude. Not even having your head shaved for charity, not in Elisabeth’s book anyway.

But hey, never mind: she had never viewed liking her colleagues as an obligation, though it was nice when it did happen. 

Her back pocket started buzzing and she found both a missed call and a text from Lily: “Call me” said the text, typically peremptory. She excused herself and went to make the call out of Dean’s earshot.

‘Why the fuck weren’you pickin’ up?’ Lily opened.

‘Because I’m at the Berkeley with your Dean, actually,’ Elisabeth said in an angry whisper. ‘Pretty loud place. When are you coming?’

‘I can’t. I’m seeing this photographer I met in New York, he’s only in London for the week. Tried to call Dean but his fuckin’ phone’s off or something. Just tell’im I’m sick or somethin’, alright?’

‘No.’

‘Whaddaya mean: no?’

‘I mean that I won’t. You told Dean you’d come and he’s waiting for you. You’ve got the rest of the week to see this other guy so get yourself over here, I don’t care how.’

‘Whadda fuck?’ Lily cried, then lit up. 

‘Get over here,’ Elisabeth repeated, ‘Where are you?’

‘West End.’

‘Great, just hop down the Victoria line and do the decent thing and stay for a couple of drinks. Then I don’t care: if you want to pretend to be unwell and shoot off to see Whatshisface from Wherever, that’s up to you.’

‘Shit, Elisabeth, what’s your problem?’

‘Well one problem is, it turns out he’s Will’s best friend and I can’t afford to get caught in the middle, OK?’

‘Alright, sorry, alright.’

‘But more to the point Dean seems like a really nice guy and he’s expecting you, Lily.’

‘Oh just fuck-off and mind your own business, alright? If you find’im so fuckin’ nice then you’re welcome to go and screw’im, got that?’

Elisabeth took the phone off her ear for a second and allowed herself time to reel back before she spoke again, very slowly:

‘That is so not my point, Lily. Just get over here, I’m not doing your dirty work for you, that’s all.’

And with that she hung up, _à la_ Kingsley, i.e. without bothering to check whether the other person was finished. Then she walked back to the chocolate fountain and told Dean truthfully that Lily had tried to call him, and should be on her way soon. 

Meanwhile Will had been stopped on his way over by the most beautiful salesgirl in the room. Even from this distance it was clear that she was delightful and doing her best to chat him up, and that he was bored out of his wits. 

‘I’ll say this about your friend,’ Elisabeth started, ‘He may say I’m hard to please but just look at him: don’t you think he might be enjoying the moment right now?’

‘Why?’ Dean asked, turning back to her with a look of genuine puzzlement. 

‘Well frankly if she isn’t good enough for him then who is?’

‘Hmm...’

‘What?’

‘How did you enjoy being hit on all the way here, Elisabeth?’

‘OK, that’s fair enough I guess, but would you look at her? She’s so pretty and she’s trying so hard, look at her: laughing at whatever he just said!’

‘Has she thought of trying to make him laugh?’

‘Hey, that’s _my_ party trick! I’m hilarious, especially during meetings with Toad. Then there’s my cack-handed receptionist impression, and of course my comedy marshmallow waitress… Oh, poor pretty salesgirl! She hasn’t got a chance, Dean, I’m the reason he’s still single, it’s as simple as that.’

Dean laughed, though perhaps a fraction later than she would have liked him to. By way of complete clarification that she was, indeed, joking, she added: 

‘How tragic for poor Will that I’m spoken for.’ 

‘That’s right. Tom, is it?’

She nodded, wondering whether Dean had this from Will, or from Lily. She would have asked him, but if he was as much like Jane as she suspected him to be, then he’d never reveal his source. 

‘Hey look, I’m all rescued here, Dean. Anyone else try to chat me up tonight I can just finish those marshmallows and then skewer their eyes right out, so if you want to go and rescue Will…’

‘We could go and rescue him together.’

Or not, she wanted to say, but ate a marshmallow instead. She felt her phone vibrate again and found another text from Lily:

“ _Hi E. D’s phone off. Dreadful headache, can’t come tonight. Tell him will call tomorrow. xxx Lily_ ”

Will, having somehow rescued himself, arrived just as she was showing Dean the text. 

‘She’s right, silly me, my phone’s out of battery. Can you text her to say I hope she feels better soon?’ Dean said feebly, putting his own phone away. 

‘I’m sorry, mate,’ Will said when he too had read the text. His right arm got half-way to giving his friend’s back a pat before he realised that both his hands were full:

‘Lizzie, grab the glasses, will you?’

‘Sure,’ she said, complying with an anxious glance at Dean’s face. 

Disappointed didn’t begin to cover it. 

‘So, what have we got here?’ she asked Will, speaking with a gaiety so exaggerated he frowned at her. Not quite the death stare, but almost. She nodded and smiled more forcibly yet, until he caught her drift and switched on the phoney smiles too:

‘Oh you’re gonna love this, mate,’ he said to Dean, ‘1999 Vonn Romany County.’

‘1999 what?’ she asked, and read the label. ‘Ooooh, you mean a _Vosne Romanée Conti_!’

‘If you say so,’ Will said, looking positively grateful that she’d just made fun of him, before he checked his friend’s face again. Elisabeth’s eyes followed his: she had never realised one could look so miserable as Dean did now, whilst technically still smiling.

‘Gosh, that’s a bit posh, isn’t it? Was it Andy’s idea, perhaps?’ she asked. Even she knew this bottle must be worth hundreds if not thousands of pounds, and commenting on it seemed the most obvious way to try and distract Dean. 

‘Only the best for you, my dear,’ Will said with his best smile. 

Impressive: he hadn’t switched on the charm on this sort of scale since that morning he’d asked her to help with Neil’s promotion. Now as then, there was an ulterior motive. Or rather a joint cause, a meeting of interests: today mission _Cheer Dean Up!_

‘But of course!’ she replied in her thickest, most obsequious Franglais, and smiled back. It seemed to work: Dean cheered up a fraction and reached for two of the glasses she was still holding. He held them up for Will to start pouring.

‘Excuse me, where are your manners, Dean, ladies first!’ Will protested with an unexpectedly amusing parody of his friend’s formal civility, and reached out to fill Elisabeth’s glass.

‘You know what, Dean?’ Elisabeth said once all three glasses were full and clinking together with a delightful sound, ‘Your friend here has called me many things before, but never a lady. Not to my face at least.’ 

Mission accomplished: both Will and Dean had finally cracked into proper smiles. Well done her, time for a tactical retreat.

‘How do you like the _Waughn Whateveryoucallit_?’ Will asked, dashing her plans of a swift exit as he swilled his wine around his glass.

‘I don’t know anything about wine.’

‘But you’re French.’

‘I’m half French.’

‘That’s more than enough: go on.’

‘I don’t know, it needs to breathe.’

‘Very true.’ 

Of course it was true. The only useful thing her otherwise incredibly boring French uncle Bernard had taught her, was that all grape-based alcoholic produce opened for under half an hour “needs to breathe”. In her experience Brits were congenitally unable to leave booze of any description open for half an hour without drinking it, so saying “It needs to breathe” on this side of the Channel was a safe bet. It was one of those useful stock phrases, like “I like their early stuff better” at a gig: unlikely to offend anyone, and it made you sound instantly knowledgeable. 

Having satisfied Will’s enquiry, Elisabeth made a renewed bid for freedom: 

‘Anyway, I guess I’m gonna head to the terrace and try and cadge a smoke while this breathes.’

‘What.’

There! She knew she should have quit while she was ahead. She knew it couldn’t last. Here it was again, the accursed Kingsley-Darcy death-stare. Back in the office she would have just ignored it, and got on with whichever of her three screens most urgently required her attention. Out here it was harder to deflect. 

‘You smoke?’ he asked, but it sounded more like a threat than a question.

‘You know what yes, I think I’ve _earned_ myself a smoke tonight,’ she said with a forced smile and a nod to the marshmallow bowl. ‘I’m gonna treat myself to a cigar, I’m sure they’ll have them. I’ll make sure to pick the most expensive one, don’t worry, even if I don’t finish it.’

‘A little bit of what you fancy does you good, Will,’ Dean said, raising his glass.

‘No, Dean, what she really fancies is in ... where is it again?’ Will asked, one eyebrow quirked. The tone was sarcastic rather than teasing, and unmistakably disparaging. Together with his lingering look of scorn it made it clear that Will lumped Tom with tobacco chocolate and marshmallows, as despicable indulgences of the weak-willed. 

Killjoy. 

‘Tom’s in Estonia,’ she said, ‘Dean, it was really nice to meet you at last.’

‘And you, Elisabeth. Goodbye,’ he said, and they kissed on both cheeks. She smiled at him then turned back to Will. They swapped barely perceptible nods, and she walked off. 

xxx

‘Oh thank Goodness for that!’ she thought when she saw Will come in the following Monday, coffees in hand. There still wasn’t quite enough length on him for a good haircut, but whatever military looking arrangement he had going on, it beat both the cue-ball, and the regrowth. 

‘Thank Goodness for what?’ he asked. 

Ah. 

‘Coffee of course. Thanks, nice haircut by the way.’

‘Thanks. You got home OK on Friday?’

‘Oh yes, I didn’t stay that much longer after I left you guys. Ah, but I’d like to register a protest about the party bags: I hear you guys all got iPods, and I get a bloody Hermes scarf. You’ve got to admit it’s vexing.’

‘So sorry, Lizzie. I’ll have a word and make sure they hand out boxes of Monte Christo’s to all the girls next year.’

He was doing such a good job of playing along, Elisabeth wondered whether just this once they might manage a whole morning coffee without an argument.

‘Thank you, yes, that would be lovely,’ she smiled. ‘And talking of ordering, I’ve bought myself a copy of _War and Peace_ on Saturday.’

‘Good call,’ he smiled back with a slow nod. 

She should have quit while she was ahead, but some stupid impulse made her add:

‘Oh and it was good to meet Dean: he's so nice!’

There you go: back to the death-stare. What now? Was she not supposed to find his friend nice? 

Bah, who cared? She turned back to her screen and got on with her day. 

‘Glad you think so,’ she heard Will say.

xxx

At lunchtime Elisabeth schlepped to the West End and back to swap the broker’s scarf. It turned out her Hermes presence was even worse than her bar presence: at first all the assistants looked from her to her orange box and back and clearly just wished she weren't spoiling their nice shop with her presence. Eventually a wise older lady with excellent French decided speaking to Elisabeth might be the swiftest way to get rid of her, and ten minutes later she left with a scarf so bright, she hoped Charlotte might like to have it for Christmas. 

A week later she experimented with another girly fantasy: the country spa, this time courtesy of her brother. She’d armed herself with a pile of trashy magazines, ready to discuss celebrity cellulite at length, which she imagined was what girls did at country spas. Instead she found that by lunchtime all she and Jane had covered were Dan, Sophie and the bump. 

And that Jane’s stoicism in relating the events of her last few weeks was, once again, pure spirit of the Blitz: she was glad that the children had caught chickenpox while in London, and not during their rainy cottage holiday in Devon, and whilst it wasn’t great that the au-pair had refused to miss any of her English lessons to look after them for the two weeks they were quarantined from nursery, Vincent had been very good and taken a full two days off work, in between his various business trips to Italy, which was fantastic juggling on his part, and had allowed Jane to keep her appointments with the midwife. And the great thing about conference calls was that she hadn’t had to miss _all_ of her meetings whilst off nursing her sick children. Between Sophie’s night terrors, the chickenpox and trying to keep up with work she’d missed up on quite a lot of sleep, of course. It made the morning-noon-and-night-sickness even worse, apparently, but then it was so much more dignified to vomit in the privacy of your own bathroom, rather than into your FT on the way to work.

For the whole morning Elisabeth listened in amazement as Jane described what sounded to her like hell on earth, all the while rubbing her tummy with a beatific smile. Eventually it came back to her at the mention of barfing into newspapers. Perhaps because it was so unlike Jane to refer explicitly to any bodily function, she remembered her friend’s smile from during the twins’ pregnancy. From a couple of months in until three days after the birth: the mind-altering pregnancy hormones. Jane’s rationality would now stay dormant for a few months, during which nothing and nobody would be able to get to her. Given she worked with Toad and lived with Vincent, it was probably just as well:

‘So have you told your boss yet?’

‘I did, last Monday.’

‘Well done! How did he take it? Had he guessed?’

‘Of course not: why should he notice someone put on four dress sizes in two months? He had no idea!’

Elisabeth smiled. 

‘And then he had to assume that that was why I’d been off. He told me I’d been _absolutely right to get some rest_. Some rest, fancy that?’

‘Oh Jesus, that’s upsetting, yes.’

‘It is, especially when I took all the time off as holiday yet still made sure I showed up to two football games and one opera with our clients.’

‘What?! You didn’t?’

‘Oh yes, it had been in the diary for weeks, the au-pair couldn’t wriggle out of that.’

‘Naturally,’ said Elisabeth, despairing of her friend’s priorities.

‘Then he went on for ages about the trouble his poor lady wife had had with her third pregnancy down at the Portland.’

‘I take it Mrs YourBoss never worked after she popped number one?’

‘Do be serious, of course not. And then he asked me how long I planned to be on break for!’ Jane said, and her beautiful eyes lit up with a spark of the purest, most innocent delight: 

‘Note the use of “break”, not “leave”,’ she carried on, ‘So I said just the statutory, and he said what’s that these days, I said three months and he says “But surely you’re not going to be away that long?”’

‘Seriously?’ Elisabeth frowned, and Jane nodded again as if this was the funniest thing ever. Amazing stuff, those pregnancy hormones. If only she could bottle some and sneak them into Will’s morning latte.

‘Hang on though, is that even legal? I mean is he allowed to say stuff like that?’

‘Elisabeth, he’s my boss, of course he can say exactly what he pleases.’

‘Jesus, Jane, good luck. Whatever you do, make sure you get that promotion before you go on your next rest-cure-slash-luxury-breastfeeding-break, will you?’

‘I’m doing my best,’ Jane shrugged modestly. ‘Launches are all on track for January, and maternity leave shouldn’t kick in until end of March, so plenty of time for them to promote me in February.’

‘And how soon do you actually plan on coming back?’

‘I’m not sure, probably about two months - the boss might just about swallow it if I work from home while I’m on leave.’

‘It’s not leave if you’re working from home,’ Elisabeth pointed out. 

‘I’ve got to show some flexibility, they’re not going to give me that promotion for free.’

‘Hmmm, unfortunately I don’t see how even you can organise and delegate the begetting of children.’

‘I’ll make it work, Elisabeth, with a little bit of help.’

‘Talking of which, is my brother shaping up? I mean apart from the heroic two days off he took to look after his own sick children?’

‘Oh I didn’t tell you, did I? He started acting really weird a couple of weeks back. He took it into his head to start rubbing my feet: you know how I hate people touching my feet!’

Elisabeth gave herself such a violent internal kick that her head jolted, and Jane wondered at her. 

‘Sorry, foot cramp,’ Elisabeth lied, and twiddled her toes. Oh, but how could she have forgotten about Jane’s phobia of pedicures? More to the point, how could her idiotic brother have forgotten? 

‘Huh, really, he did that?’ Elisabeth asked when she was done wincing.

‘I don’t know what got into him. But it’s all over now, thank god! I’ve hardly seen him last week, he’s been in Italy a lot.’

‘It must be tough.’

‘Actually, it’s quite nice having time to myself after the kids have gone to bed.’

Elisabeth shook her head, mystified. She hadn’t witnessed such irrational exuberance since the 1980s housing bubble. She must remember never ever to get married and have children.

‘But enough about me and the kids,’ Jane said, ‘how's life without Tom?’

‘I do miss him,’ Elisabeth said, breaking into a smile at the mere mention of his name. It was great having someone to miss. 

The guys at work always knew just by that look on her face when she’d been reading one of his emails. They were oh-so-romantic: all the sentiment of the love letters of old, but with a dash of irony too, and without having to wait for Ocean liners to bring the post. Through them she learnt of the endless forests and of the Germanic orderliness of Eastern Estonia, learnt the taste of the winter air at dusk in Tallinn, and that of male loneliness drenched in black market vodka. Last weekend Tom and his Finnish colleague had taken the night-train to Saint Petersburg, crossed into Russia without a visa, got drunk frozen and eventually mobbed before fraternising with locals and their samovars on the way back.

‘When’s he coming back?’ Jane asked, interrupting her reverie.

‘Two days after we head to France, sadly,’ Elisabeth replied with a deep sigh.

‘Cancel!’

‘I can’t do that, come on, I haven’t seen the French aunts all year, what with New York.’

‘Could he come along?’

‘No, it’s the same for him, family stuff. We’ll just see each other after New Year I guess, after that stupid Y2K test.’

‘That’s right, yes. But you guys must Skype all the time, right?’

‘We do, yes. It’s horrid.’

‘Why?’

‘Well first of all the modem at home goes apoplectic every time we try and switch on video mode. But even when it doesn’t, he just seems to swim in low-pixel slow-down jelly. Seriously, Jane, don’t ever attempt irony on Skype. Tom reckons there must be some giant cyber-spiders prowling the World Wide Web, feeding on all the humour that gets lost on Voice-Over-Internet lines.’

The image had made her smile when Tom had come up with it, emailing one morning after a particularly bad quality call the night before. Now, out of her own mouth, the same line came out flat.

‘I hadn’t thought about it before but you’re right, humour doesn’t really work on conference calls either,’ Jane said, ‘But still, Skype’s got to be better than email, right?’

‘Oh no, emails are the best!’

Jane frowned.

‘I don’t know, the whole relationship’s just weird without the irony. It’s so much nicer when we have time to choose our words. To savour what’s been written, as well. I can read the same email over and over again and...’ she stopped, judging by Jane’s face that she must be inexplicably insensitive to Tom’s charms. 

‘I hope you don’t do any of this from the office?’

‘Jesus, don’t you start! You’re sounding the way Will looks, half the time.’

‘It is unprofessional, Elisabeth, and unprofessional is not like you.’

‘I know, and great fun it is too.’

* * *

**From** : Tom Reilly <reilly_weerd@hotmail.com>

 **To** : Elisabeth R Bennet <er.bennet@___.com>

 **Subject** : Day 34

 **Sent** : Tue 14 December 01:35

I don’t know if I can survive another day of bootleg vodka and PPTP encryption, let alone another week. Why do people do this, why do I, when I could be swimming with you in Hawaii? You said yourself, it’s lovely there. 

I’ve now been pickling myself alive with a fat Finn every evening for 34 days. Even with the very thickest of vodka-glasses on he’s still not remotely attractive. He’s told me far more than I ever want to know about Linux and football, and the ignoramus knows no German poetry - whatsoever. I’ve checked. He does sing a nice Finnish lullaby after he’s had a few though. Still, I know tonight I’m gonna dream yet again of getting back home and to our room, and of all the stuff I’m going to do to you when I get you back into that bed and stone cold sober this time. It’s a good dream.

By the way if you’re smiling in an unprofessional manner right now and Willy Wanker disapproves tell him to piss off for me. He doesn’t know the meaning of tough. Tough isn’t losing millions, it’s waking up from that dream, as I inevitably will far too early tomorrow morning, and realising that I’m still stuck here without you. So night night luvvie, I miss you. 

Tom

* * *

**From** : Elisabeth R Bennet <er.bennet@___.com>

 **To** : Tom Reilly <reilly_weerd@hotmail.com>

 **Subject** : Morning 35

 **Sent** : Tue 15 December 07:03

Another night over. I’m having to get here earlier every day in order to catch some private time with our illicit correspondence. Will’s been serving coffee with a scowl of late, I expect we’ve got about ten minutes before I get interrupted. So good morning to you and take heart, my love, not much longer now. In answer to your question the reason most of us do this is so we can pay the rent on the room in the flat, then the mortgage, then the nursery/school fees and then die having had no fun whatsoever. 

Sorry, that last weekend I spent with Jane has left deep emotional scars. Perhaps your Hawaii plan isn’t so crazy after all, you know. Not with those screens flashing all around already. In an hour’s time the din around here will be deafening. All this noise and fury, and for what?

Ooops, I can see him walk across the atrium, coffees in hand. I miss you too you know, plus que je ne puisse l’ecrire. See you in 15 days. I’m counting. 

Love

Zab xx

* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> copyright 2021 Mel Liffragh, all rights reserved.


	15. Fresh Blow

Thursday the 16th of December was the bank’s Christmas party. It was barely past eight o’clock and the good news was, the boys seemed to be getting over the initial shock of seeing Elisabeth in the shortish black dress she’d been wearing indiscriminately to every dressy event for the last seven years. Also, Will had been in an exceptionally benign mood, and hadn’t shot her a single death-stare so far this evening. He was at his combative best, however, playing the drinking game, the rules of which had been circulated well in advance by e-mail: touch your face, drink one finger, touch your hair, same thing, call anyone at the trading table by their name or usual nickname, same thing. Point at someone to get around naming them, two fingers. And at VP level and above –just Will and Elisabeth for now- there was an additional no gloating rule, penalty three fingers. 

The bad news was: Paul was already plastered. His downfall was his compulsive hair fiddling: he’d been caught early on by Andy, who’d just been caught by Neil calling him Paul. They’d both drunk a finger of the sour Chardonnay accompanying the starters. 

Elisabeth’s strategy had been to stick to soda water until dinner, despite the free champagne, so that she started ahead of the pack in terms of sobriety. She now knew her danger zone to be her unruly hair, but she’d also have to watch her tendency to gloat if she did catch anyone else out. To her the best thing about the drinking game was the difficulty the boys had calling their softest target neither Paul nor gay, pufter, queen, pinko, queer, fairy, sausage jockey, or any of the more elaborate profanities from Will’s early email.

‘With all due respect,’ she said to Will, ‘I do believe that the younger member of the small cap team did just point at my new joiner in reference to his hair-touching.’

‘Sadly you are right, Frenchie. Go on, you, two fingers, and one for…’ oh, Will’s struggle for words was a beautiful thing to behold ‘…the person who just touched their hair.’

‘Well saved!’ Neil pouted. Andy let out a few expletives as he topped up his glass to find two fingers in it. Paul gave a braying laugh reminiscent of Mac’s, before draining his to the last dregs.

‘I think that should cover you for a couple more offences,’ Will said.

‘We haven’t got Lizzie yet!’ Newbie said, and they all turned to him. 

‘Oh, man!’ he said with a shake of his spiky-haired head, and drank. 

Elisabeth smiled.

‘Watch the gloating! Is she gloating? I can’t see,’ Will said, turning to look at her from the next seat. They had instinctively assumed the same seating plan as around the dealer boards: Will, Elisabeth, Neil, Paul, Newbie, Andy, Yoda.

‘Most certainly not, my fine fellow!’ she said. Her fine fellow? Whatever. 

Neil was examining her face: ‘Nope, sorry, Sir, no gloating there.’

‘Guess you’re right: damn, Lizzie, you’re still far too sober, that’s the problem.’ 

She raised an eyebrow.

‘Drink up, big man!’ she said, and bit her lips tight not to smile while he drank and the rest of the team cheered her.

‘And still she doesn’t gloat!’ Newbie grumbled. ‘It’s not fair.’

‘If it’s any consolation I’m finding it really hard not to,’ she said, her voice breaking and her eyes watering with the effort not to laugh.

‘Tell you how we could get her,’ Will said to Neil as he put his glass back down. ‘Let’s embarrass her. Ask her something awkward and she’ll start tucking her hair back, you’ll see. Every. Time.’ 

Elisabeth looked round to him, surprised and inexplicably offended. And started fiddling with her fork like a maniac because indeed, now she knew that she mustn’t, tucking her hair back was all she could think about. Will was watching her with that glint in his eye that told her he was enjoying her struggle. Good for him, but there was no way she’d increase his pleasure by blushing as well, so she turned her eyes down to her dessert spoon and braced herself: 

‘OK, right, shoot!’ she said setting her hands on the table either side of her plate and looking right at him, then around at Neil with a nod. ‘Do your worst: you get one shot.’

Will smiled at her for a while: he always looked happiest before a good fight and his eye lit up as he looked at her, half-taunting and half-threatening, and wholly certain of victory. But her spirits were raised too, and she was just as determined to prevail as he was. Did he think that just because OK, objectively, perhaps she wasn’t the best at keeping it together under all circumstances, did he really think that he could make her lose it? The arrogance of it! No way. Her suspense endured while plates of cardboard-like turkey were set in front of them, then Will finally took his shot:

‘OK ma’mselle, here goes: which one of us “fine fellows” here assembled is a polyorchid?’

‘I know that one! He was boasting about it all last week! It’s New… It’s the young derivative trader!’ she said, and hit the table with the flat of her palm. Ha! So Newbie had three gonads: big deal. ‘There, I didn’t name him and I didn’t nearly touch my hair, so eat poo!’ she added, jabbing the air in front of Will’s face with a victorious index. 

He sat back and crossed his arms in front of him, beaming from ear to ear. 

‘And that will be three fingers! Now, clever clogs,’ he said then, turning to his boys: ‘Voila!’

‘You just gloated too, Sir,’ Yoda chipped in on his left just as Elisabeth’s head was about to explode with frustration. This was the first time Yoda had opened his mouth all evening, other than to eat drink or smoke. He’d just been steadily stroking his bald patch, then tipping his glass without waiting for anyone to catch him.

‘Drink up, both of you!’ Paul screamed with excitement. Will and Elisabeth looked at each other and raised their elbows in synch.

‘So worth it!’ they said together as they put their glasses back down.

There was a perfectly good dance floor and a couple of other attractions, but after pudding and crackers the guys decided to spoof for who’d go and get the champagne instead. 

‘What’s spoof?’ Elisabeth asked.

‘Yes, what iz it?’ said Paul.

‘Haven’t they taught you but anything?’ Will asked. 

The French team shrugged. 

‘OK,’ Neil explained, ‘everyone places between zero and three coins in their hand, fists in the middle. We take turns at guessing how many coins are in the middle in total. Two people can’t call the same number, person with the right call leaves the game and last person in the game is a big fat loser. Simple.’

‘Right,’ said Elisabeth, and while she took it all in she bent down to retrieve the stupid little clutch containing her change from under her chair. Unfortunately her brain was too busy with spoof-related game theory to remember that while her head was upside down simple gravity would make a complete mess of her hair. She emerged back up from under her chair and put three coppers on the table, then tried her best to shake and blow stray locks, out of her eyes at the very least. Besides entertaining everyone else around the table, this achieved very little. Alternatives were now asking one of her neighbours to tuck back her hair – highly inappropriate- or drinking another finger. All eyes were once more upon her.

‘Right, someone top me up,’ she sighed, and Neil obliged while Will bit back a smile. But the non-VPs around the table more than made up for his restraint by cheering her as she drank again, then tucked her hair all back safely behind her ears.

‘OK, let’s do this,’ she said, her head already beginning to spin as she put her glass back down. 

‘Uh, Sir?’ Neil said.

‘Yes?’

‘We can’t play two first-timers, that’s just not fair. Shall we do teams?’ 

‘You’re right, OK, just for the first couple of rounds though. You take…’ oh, she saw Will struggle, refrain from pointing and think again, ‘You take the male spoof virgin and I’ll take the other geek, she’s odds on to lose.’

‘Thanks!’ Elisabeth said. They’d all started fiddling with coins under the table and putting one fist out where their plates had been:

‘Ladies first, you start,’ said Neil.

‘Let’s see, 7 times one point five is 10.5, I’ll call it 11.’

‘Told you she was gonna lose,’ Will said.

‘12,’ said Neil

‘11?’ asked Paul. 

‘You can’t say that, she’s already called it,’ Neil reminded him.

‘14?’

‘Bullish,’ said Newbie. ‘I’ll go nine.’

‘Shit, that’s what I was gonna call -uh, 10,’ said Andy. Master Yoda stroked his bald patch, took a slow sip of wine, and said:

’13,’ before drinking again. Will had a look at the faces around the table::

‘8. Show up!’ 

They counted the coins: 14, three of which were Paul’s. He punched the air with both fists and got out with an excited screech. 

Master Yoda got out next and went outside for a fag. Next out were Will, Neil and Newbie, and then it was down to Elisabeth and a foul-mooded Andy, who’d twice been prevented from calling the winning number by the person just ahead of him. OK, so any number between zero and six… Elisabeth did not like how stressful she was finding this. She wasn’t proud of her track record to this point –a solid statistical approach must not be what was required here – but childish though it was, the idea of proving Will right about her made it ten times worse.

She looked at her hand under the table, took all the coins out, and stuck with statistics to the last. Paul was snapping away on some new-fangled digital camera he’d just bought. Elisabeth caught Will’s eye and nodded at her open hand under the table. He barely looked at it and shrugged:

‘Go on, call it, what do you need me for?’

‘Come on then, you fuckin’ French loser!’ Andy barked.

Right. Think calmly. She had a huge advantage here, speaking first. She knew her hand, so it was just a matter of guessing his: zero, one, two or three. Average outcome: 1.5. But it made sense to go all or nothing in the last round, so he was probably gonna go one or zero, or else three, but probably not two. Last round he’d gone low, so he’d expect her to expect he’d go high this time and go low instead. So go with low this time - call either one, or else three. But then calling one would reveal she hadn’t kept much, and leak information. And what if he went high again, just to go against what he’d expect her to expect. Or would he? Oooh, she just didn’t know, so statistics got the better of her again and she went for the average:

‘OK, two!’ she said trying to sound confident, but immediately saw she was undone.

‘One!’ he said, slammed his single coin on the table, and raised both his arms in triumph. 

‘Good play!’ Neil nodded. 

‘Told you!’ Will said with a cheery smile. 

‘That’s right. So you enjoy the gloating and drink your three fingers, Mr Smartarse,’ she said with a little smile back at him, then rose from her chair and pulled the skirt of her dress back down. This she tried to perform as discreetly as possible, conscious they were all including Paul checking her out again – nothing personal, just the novelty value. 

‘I’ll be off to the bar,’ she said. And to think she didn’t even care about the champagne in the first place. Oh well.

‘Oh come on, Lizzie!’ Will reappeared on her right as she joined the throngs in front of the bar.

‘What? No it’s OK, I can handle this, really I can. You go and have fun with the guys.’

‘I can’t let you lose by yourself. We were a team, remember, what would Raj say?’

‘Oh you smarmy bastard!’ she said, smiling as she shook her head, ‘Oh yes, that’s right.’

‘We can’t let beginners lose by themselves, we need you to play again.’

‘I see, yes.’

‘So we can fleece you again.’

‘Of course. It’s not just because you enjoy rubbing it in, then?’

‘Not only but yes, that’s a bonus. And it looks like I’ll have plenty of time to do that,’ he said pointing at the solid ranks of black-tied backs between them and the bar. He was still in a great mood, and after four fingers’ worth of Chardonnay Elisabeth was pretty happy too, happy enough to indulge even Fitzwilliam Kingsley-Darcy in this rare show of playfulness. 

A gaggle of Market Data girls now arrived, said hi, carefully arranged themselves around him and proceeded to make a spectacle of themselves. Their heels were so high their knees couldn’t unbend fully, their laughs too loud and their plentiful derrieres squeezed into shiny tunics that left far too little to the imagination. The pouting, the prancing, the eyelid batting... the indignity of it all made Elisabeth cringe: seriously, did they have no shame? 

To think of all the years of her professional life Elisabeth had spent trying to prove that women deserved respect from the old boys around here. She tried to tell herself that they were just harmless silly girls, trying to have a good time. That Charlotte would have approved. Still, Elisabeth wanted to kill at least a few of the brashest ones. 

They were saved by a herd of roving Pimms programmers who, attracted by the loudness either of their cry or of their plumage, surrounded the Market Data girls and proceeded to grin gurn and swagger until they all disappeared together to go and queue up for the golf simulator. Elisabeth shook her head as she watched them go then, turning back to Will, found him still smiling:

‘And by the way,’ he said, ‘you tucked your hair back as soon as you lost that last round of spoof, but I didn’t have the heart to...’

‘Shhh!’ she shushed him. He held his hands up and started sayng something, but she pushed him away and held him at arm’s length while she leant to the left, straining to hear a deep voice ahead of her:

‘Yes, damn shame about that Bingley girl expecting again. Damn fine girl!’ 

Elisabeth couldn’t hear the reply. One of the backs in front of her, the stooping one with the deep voice, was definitely Toad’s, the other one was too quiet for her to identify, but the back of his head could have belonged to Jane’s boss.

‘Yes, I don’t reckon she will either,’ Toad started again. ‘My wife went back after Rosie, but with two there’s really no point.’ 

Ah but he was wrong there: Jane _Bennet_ Bingley, had indeed found it worthwhile going back to work after having both Dan and Sophie. Again Elisabeth couldn’t hear the reply, although she started to edge her way left, elbowing the poor guy next to her as Will looked on, less than impressed. Well tough:

‘Hell, if she wanted to make MD she should have thought about it before she went and got herself sprogged up,’ she heard Toad say. ‘Still, that frees up an MD slot for Nigel in January.’

‘She won’t want a holiday _and_ a promotion,’ the other voice said, definitely Jane’s boss’s voice. Elisabeth had now burrowed her way so she stood as close behind them as it was possible to, without actually touching Toad’s back. She saw their shoulders go up and down as they both enjoyed the joke and felt her nails dig into her hands as she clenched her fists. Then her head jerked back as someone pulled at her elbow: Will, who’d caught up with her and was dragging her back through the crowd and to the far end of the bar, turning many a disapproving head along the way.

‘Right, you stay here,’ he said. No need – though her eyes were still scanning the crowd for Toad and Jane’s boss she couldn’t have moved if she’d wanted to: shock and anger rooted her to the floor. The bastards! After Jane had worked herself silly, and bloated, in fact to the verge of exhaustion for their effing fund launches. And she was going to pull them off too, and now she’d also agreed to keep her maternity leave short, even though she didn’t have to. How on earth could they expect her to rush back to her desk if they promoted stupid Nigel instead of her? Nigel whose only conceivable advantage over Jane were his big self-promoting gob and his lack of a uterus. If she’d been a bloke, right now Elisabeth might well have punched the pair of them. Then again, if she’d been a bloke, right now she would have seen that you can’t expect both a holiday and a promotion, right?

‘You OK? Hold this,’ Will said, and handed over two tumblers of clear fizzy stuff. 'Stay here, I'll be right back,' he said again, and went back to the bar, presumably to fetch the bottle she'd originally come for. She complied and continued to ruminate, only vaguely aware of the damp cold glasses against the skin of her palms. Numbing the ire at the edges. There was Will again:

‘Right. Dunno what’s up here, but you look like you need some fresh air. Are you gonna start to hyperventilate?’

She shook her head, still too stunned to speak. 

‘Good.’

He grabbed one of the glasses, and with his free hand frog marched her outside. 

‘Shit, it’s freezing!’ she said, shocked out of her angry stupor, and before she knew it his jacket was on her shoulders. 

‘Pardon my French,’ she said as the most absurd afterthought.

‘Sure.’ 

A couple of waiters on their break stared at the two of them and elbowed each other suggestively, as did a couple of guys from Operations also out for some nicotine. Will walked Elisabeth past them, along a low wall until they were a few meter away from the nearest group, and set the drinks down. Then he reached inside the jacket pocket on her right. 

‘Might this help?’ he asked, and produced a cigar. 

She frowned: nothing made sense anymore. Jane’s boss was handing over her promotion to some random Nigel. The general view was that women should know better than to get sprogged up and what, start ordering children on Amazon instead? Meanwhile she was wearing Will’s jacket, and Will was being nice for no reason and plying her with cigars. Will disapproved of cigars, hence this must be a bad dream - just a really really weird bad dream, right? Only one way to find out:

‘Thanks,’ she said, reaching for the cigar with a slow, mistrusting hand. It didn’t vanish or melt when she touched it, in fact as she unwrapped it the plastic crumpled in her hand with a very lifelike crackle, and then a lovely aroma reached her nostrils. No, this must be real alright: dreams never smell this good. 

How sweet, how absurdly sweet this was in the middle of... oh dear no, this was hardly the place for tears, no no no. She picked her head up, took a deep breath and made herself look at Will and try to smile.

She didn’t manage of course, but she did try. 

‘There’s a light there as well,’ Will said, pointing to the same pocket. She looked down and rummaged, found a strip of promotional matches and lit up, and then tilted her head back. 

The sky was clear and starry, just like the inside of the marquee, which had been draped in black cloth and peppered with fairy lights to the most ravishing effect. So she tried the other useful thing boring uncle Bernard had taught her back in France: the one advantage of being short sighted. If you tucked your chin in and let your glasses slide down your nose, then tilted your head back just a tiny bit, then in the blur over the top of the lenses you could make any star, real or electric, lose its pinprick sharpness for a moment and start twinkling away, just for you. The idea was to let the benign permanence of the celestial bodies put your worries into perspective - remind you of their true, insignificant proportions, blah blah. It had worked a treat on the hills of the Auvergne behind uncle Bernard’s house, when she’d been worried about leaving France behind for London. It had sort of worked too on the beaches in Hawaii, when she’d been trying to forget about Mike. But tonight in London tilting her head back just made it hurt. 

Still, she stuck with it until the nicotine hit, and until sorrow and outrage turned into a mere concentration of physical pain beneath her temples. Then she looked back down and at Will, passing a wince of pain off as an apologetic smile:

‘Thanks, sorry about that. Much appreciated, as you see,’ she said, raising the cigar.

‘No trouble,’ he lied. 

This she knew because his right eyebrow was up and out a bit. This wasn’t the familiar “Did I just stumble upon a new sub-species of dust-mite?” look, the one he’d given her throughout his early career at the bank whenever she tried to talk to him. No, that look involved both his eyebrows being up and out, and the corners of the mouth down. Whereas right now only his right eyebrow was out of line, and he was pretending to be smiling. She’d only seen that look maybe two or three times before, always on bonus-defying, six-figure trading-cock-up days. She couldn’t be doing that to him: he could hate her, despise her, work around her, have all the fun he liked at her expense, that was all fine, but she wasn’t having him worry about her. Shit, he really did think she was going to start hyperventilating, didn’t he? 

Because, of course, that’s what women do, right? They get pregnant, she thought with another surge of anger and a jab of pain behind her eyeballs so sharp, it brought her stomach to her lips. Women get pregnant and then they have hysteric fits, because unlike the Fitzwilliam Kingsley-Darcys of this world they are no good at self-control. Ha!

‘Can I ask what’s up?’ he said, still with that disturbing right eyebrow.

‘Nothing,’ she looked at him, pretending to be wincing at her own smoke, and flapping it away from her face. ‘I just heard something I probably wasn’t meant to out there.’

He nodded, and she felt another jab of pain.

‘No take it back, certainly not meant to hear. It’s about a friend and it’s so bloody unfair it’s made me… No sorry, let me just shut up while I can, I’m being indiscreet, I…’ still the damn eyebrow wouldn’t get back into place. ‘I think I’ve already made enough of a spectacle of myself tonight, wouldn’t you say?’ she said with a wave of the cigar towards the Ops guys, who were still busy ogling them.

Surely he of all people would see the funny side of that? Perhaps he did. The damn eyebrow fell back into line, and Will to his normal, reassuringly contrary self:

‘You haven’t made a spectacle of yourself.’

‘For once. Perhaps not by my usual high standards.’

A smile: in the circumstances it was much appreciated, only it made her head hurt again. 

‘But the show must go on,’ she said thumbing at the Ops guys again.

‘Who cares?’

‘Quite. What’s in the glasses then?’ she asked, hoping it might be something to clear her head.

‘Ah, knowing you I’ve hedged my bets. There’s a gin and tonic and a sparkling water. Which one would you like?’

‘The water, please.’

‘I was hoping you’d say that,’ he said, and took a few gulps of the other glass. She drank too, and for a few seconds let the coolness of the drink numb her head.

‘Thanks. I think that’s done the trick, thanks,’ she lied.

‘You sure you’re OK?’ he asked, looking worried again. She really couldn’t be doing with his worry. 

‘Aha. Do you want to head back in? I’ll be fine here.’

‘Doesn’t seem right.’

Right? Who cared? Which part of this whole thing was “right” anyway? But for now she had to do something to wipe the worry off his face, because that wasn’t “right” either. If anything it was worse than all the contempt put together, that she’d ever endured from him before. 

‘I won’t nick your jacket, promise, it’s far too big for me anyway,’ she joked, though it cost her a lurch of her stomach and another stab of pain at the temples. Once again she hid her wince behind a pathetic effort at a smile, and perhaps he did the same: with weary eyes she watched little folds form in his cheeks, either side of his mouth.

‘Let’s finish this drink,’ he said, raising his glass, ‘Toast to a better new year and all that. You up for that?’

For once he managed to make the question sound like a question, and not like an order. To make it sound like they were just having a drink down the pub with some broker, and not out here by themselves under the curious eyes of half the Ops team. To move things on, in short, and make them sound normal and pretend that she wasn’t behaving like a psycho or looking like she was about to start hyperventilating. 

Which she wasn’t.

But hey, bless Will’s ability to dissemble. If he could do such a good job of it then why not go along with it too? Why not pretend, for as long as it took him to finish his G&T, that all was well and the world was not the wicked and cruel place Toad and Jane’s boss had just turned it into? She had the whole rest of her life to live in that world.

‘Happy New Year, Will,’ she said, raising her glass back. They clinked.

‘And to you. What are you up to over Christmas?’

‘I’ll be in France, then back here for that stupid Y2K testing.’

‘Ah, that’s right. Why didn’t you send Paul?’

‘Oh no, tradePad’s nowhere near “live” as far as IT are concerned, I’m testing stuff I wrote for my old team. You?’

‘Yeah, Christmas back home, then off skiing with Dean.’

‘Cool, where are you guys going?’ 

‘Vale.’

‘Wow, lucky you. I’m officially jealous.’

‘Sorry, I was supposed to cheer you up. I don’t know -isn’t that boyfriend of yours coming back soon?’

‘You’re right,’ she said, and despite Will’s truly valiant effort not to frown as he mentioned Tom she felt compelled to look away. ‘He’s coming back,’ she whispered to herself, ‘He is,’ and the corner of her lips edged up, ever so slightly, in spite of it all.

‘There you go, then, it’s not all bad.’

‘You’re right, of course it’s not!’ she said, looking back up. But now Will cleared his throat and looked away. Well of course, even with his bluffing faculties it must have been quite an effort mentioning Tom with a straight face. He’d been very good tonight, but she mustn’t ask for the impossible. 

‘Shall we head back in? You must be freezing,’ she said, trying for an outright smile. He looked back at her, perhaps a little surprised, then put his poker face back on.

‘Sure, let’s go.’

They made their way back past the smoking waiters and the Operations crowd again, and through the hall where a few early leavers, amongst them Jane, were collecting their coats from the cloakroom. Elisabeth gave her friend a brief nod and accelerated past her, before Jane’s lingering stare made her realise she was still wearing an outsized dinner jacket. She whipped it off, and only as she did so did she notice its smell, Will’s well-groomed yet unmistakably male smell. She looked down as she handed it back to him, vexed with the strange idea now intruding in her mind, of their scents mingling on the fabric, together with that of the cigar’s smoke. When she looked back up Will seemed worried again, so she ignored the fresh jab of pain beneath her temples and forced herself to say a cheerful but impersonal-sounding:

‘Nice jacket but it looks better on you! Thanks again.’

‘You scrub up well too.’

‘Would you believe it? Elisabeth Bennet’s got legs!’ someone said as they walked past. With a cheeky, supposedly friendly wink at her. Only the eighth person to give her that line tonight:

‘Why is it, Will, that Neil can wear a skirt and no one bats an eyelid, but when I do somehow that’s headline material?’ she said, shaking her head. 

‘Neil’s legs are nowhere as good,’ Will answered gamely. 

‘Seriously, this stopped being funny about 20 years ago,’ she sighed, and shook her head again. Will looked at her, opened his mouth then, wisely, thought better of it and shut up again. He’d probably have her down as some humourless paragon of political correctness. Well, tough. 

‘I think I’ll go and see the research guys. Thanks again,’ she said, and walked away.

The Quantitative Equity Research team, a.k.a. the Foreign Legion of Banking, were only half drunk, meaning that the Greek contingent were plastered while the stray Muslim and the American boss were talking shop, both being stone cold sober for equal and opposite religious reasons. Ah, the spirit of Christmas… Elisabeth’s thoughts returned to Jane’s innocent happy face by the cloakroom, and from there to Toad’s hateful back, his stupid, mousy, ill-trimmed hair poking down in greasy spikes over the top of his collar. Her head was still hurting and she grabbed an unfinished bottle of water off the table and swigged it straight from the bottle on her way back to the trading table. 

‘Check this out!’ Paul squealed at her as soon as she got in sight, and she winced with fresh pain.

‘This is wicked, man!’ Newbie slurred.

Andy was standing behind them, or more accurately swaying from side to side under the influence, even while holding on to the back of Paul’s chair. Paul’s hot pink satin cummerbund and outsized bow tie combo were unravelling, and he looked ecstatic. 

‘Hey, Boss! Let me take your picture!’ he said to Elisabeth. She held the neck of the bottle up and smiled through another jab of pain. 

‘Come and see!’ said Paul.

She sat next to him and Newbie went off to the bar with Andy. 

‘Wann anyfink?’ he asked. 

‘No thanks, I’m sorted’ she replied, raising the litre of Hilton Spring.

‘Anozer Mai Tai!’ sang Paul.

‘OK let’s have a look,’ she said, and he let her scroll through his pictures. Kudos to the boy, he had a real skill for capturing the moment. This was a whole alternative Christmas album. There was Sarah Atkinson leaning in suggestively. He had wisely cut the shot halfway up her face to maximise exposure of her cleavage. In the next one she was wrapped around someone Elisabeth thought she’d seen before, perhaps on the Transitions team, with their bow tie half undone and a scarlet lipstick mark on their collar. There was mooning by various people, mostly IT. And a full frontal by Neil lifting his kilt with a cheeky grin, which made her wince. There were some fascinating dance moves. Lots of non-accidental pictures of people’s feet, especially of women in very high heels. One of the Chairman, Sir Phillip, on the bog, taken from above the partition with the next cubicle. And taken from the same place but to the other side of that cubicle, there were two people in what looked like the handicapped cube, bent over two nice fat lines of coke.

‘Can I zoom in on this thing?’

‘Yes sure, just ‘ere, look. Do you know zem?’

‘Fuck me, Paul,’ she said shaking her aching head in disbelief, ‘I mean, pardon my French, but think you’ve got yourself a picture of Toad blowing some early Christmas snow here!’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next Friday will be Christmas in real life, so I don't think I will be posting. As it happens Elisabeth will be on her festive break too, but unlike me she gets to travel and hang out with her relatives!  
> I hope you have a good Christmas despite this all new, non Y2K, 2020 bug. Watch out for the other half of this story in the New Year!  
> All the best  
> Mel
> 
> copyright 2021 Mel Liffragh, all rights reserved.


	16. Bugged

_I will be out of the office until January 4 th. If your query is urgent please contact Neil McLeod or anyone on the trading desk._

_Best regards,_

_Elisabeth Bennet_

She switched on the Out of Office reply, closed Outlook, then re-opened it and started typing again:

_Off to France tomorrow: is there something I can send you from across the sea, from the place that I’ll be landing?_

This time she left Outlook running while she closed the dozens of other windows still open across her screens, then stood up and started putting her coat on, then her gloves and woolly hat. 

‘You off then?’ Neil asked.

‘Yeah, almost.’

She sat back down and took a glove off. Still no reply. She closed Outlook with a sigh. Then she reopened it one more time and there it was, Tom’s reply, picking up Bob Dylan right where she’d left him:

_No there’s nothing you can send me, my own true love, there is nothing I am wishing to be owning. Just carry yourself back to me unspoilt, from across that lonesome ocean._

It wasn’t an ocean it was only the English Channel but oh God, she couldn’t wait. 

‘Have a good one,’ she heard as she stepped into the atrium. She turned back, Will and Neil were looking at her.

‘Oh yes, sorry! You guys too, have a lovely Christmas!’ she smiled, and walked off. 

Since Ben and Mac had already headed back to the provinces, Elisabeth had invited Charlotte around on her last night in London. She figured her new lifestyle would probably be a culture shock for her friend, so the timing was ideal: start by introducing just the flat; save the flatmates for later. She got home and baked, hoping to soften Charlotte up by using extra butter and sugar. She even tidied up a bit while the cake was in the oven. 

Despite these efforts Charlotte’s face did freeze when she entered the lounge -probably the first person to do so wearing stilettos and a camel coat since Ben and Mac had moved in. Charlotte made no comment though, even as she gingerly sat down on the edge of the sofa, only to be swallowed by its collapsed seat. Elisabeth hastened to produce a cup of creamy earl grey and a slice of chocolate cake while Charlotte righted herself up:

‘Oh my god, zhish ish good!’ Charlotte said, eating her first mouthful. 

‘Thanks! The oven’s actually really good. Do you want to come and see my room?’

‘Later, let me enjoy this first!’

‘Cool.’

‘Which one of them did this?’ Charlotte asked, waving her spoon at the fresco.

‘Ben did. You get used to it after a while.’ 

Charlotte frowned down at her plate, which was already almost empty, and for a moment she ran a scarlet-nailed finger over her crumbs in atypical silence.

‘You OK?’ Elisabeth asked. ‘Are you warm enough? Shall I turn the heating up?’

‘So basically,’ Charlotte repressed a guffaw before she went on, ‘So basically you used to have this really nice flat, and you’ve given it to Mike so you could move into this complete dump!’ she said, and let out one of her legendary peals of laughter. ‘Oh Jesus, Elisabeth, now I can wait to meet the housemates! Really, I can!’

OK, so it was much better to see Charlotte laughing, than on best behaviour, and yet Elisabeth didn’t feel ready to join in and laugh at Ben and Mac: 

‘Look it’s easy to make fun, Charlie, but they’re great, really.’

Charlotte ate up the last of her cake, looked around her and then almost laughed again but she stopped the moment she saw the wounded look on Elisabeth’s face. 

‘I’m sorry, hon, I didn’t mean it like that. But it’s just, honestly, it’s really hard to know what to say!’

‘Oh I know, I had that too, at first– and you haven’t seen my blue walls yet,’ Elisabeth said pensively. Charlotte frowned. 

‘But it’s fine, really,’ she started again, ‘We put music on and make pancakes and pasta and bacon sarnies and tarts and read _News of the Screws_ and it all gets very homely.’

‘I’m sure you’re right, Elisabeth, I’m sure you’re right,’ said Charlotte, dabbing at her laughter-teared mascara. ‘Still, your Tom must be quite something to make this place attractive. When’s he back again? When do I get to meet him?’

‘New Year... the guys are having a party, I’ll come straight back here after the Y2K test and...’

‘And then I bet I’ll be the last of your priorities!’

‘You’re probably right,’ Elisabeth smiled, a little coyly despite her friend’s indulgent gaze. ‘But I promise I’ll set something up for you to meet him as soon as we’ve had time to catch up just the two of us.’

‘Great!’

‘But promise not to be polite about him either, OK? He does go with the flat, you understand?’

‘I’ll do my best. How big is his trust fund again?’ Charlotte asked, miming with her hands what didn’t look like the size of a trust fund. 

‘Oh, shush! Anyway, how about you? How about another slice of cake? You’re not dieting for the wedding dress, are you?’

‘Definitely not, pile it on!’ Charlotte said, but then let out a deep sigh. ‘Oh, honey, I need to...’

‘Yes?’

‘Are you sure Tom doesn’t want to come to the wedding?’

‘That’s really kind of you, Charlie, but he won’t know anyone. We hardly know each other, for that matter. No don’t worry about it, it’s probably a bit too early for that.’

‘It’s just that...’ Charlotte took a bite, swallowed, sighed again.

‘Go on?’

‘It’s just that Mike’s asked to bring Rachel along and stupid Colin’s gone and said yes,’ Charlotte said, so nervous that she forgot her exclamation marks. She needn’t have:

‘Jeeze, naughty Colin!’ Elisabeth laughed, ‘It’s not as though he’s the groom or anything!’

‘You don’t mind?’

‘I take it we’re talking about little Rachel from Mike’s office, right?’

Charlotte nodded, dumbstruck. But enough water had flown under the bridge now, and enough emails had passed between London and Tallinn, for Elisabeth not to wish anyone any harm, not even “little Rachel from Mike’s office”. Sure, she’d been pursuing Mike unashamedly for years. She’d even tried to snog him right in front of Elisabeth’s very nose at their last office Christmas do – but so what?

‘So she’s finally got her grubby little hands on him, hey? Well good on her, hope they’re happy?’

Charlotte’s astonishment was beginning to melt into relief:

‘I guess they must be, if he’s asking to take her along. But look, I know you’ve been really cool about it but still, I feel really bad: you’re going to be banished to some singles’ table while she’s sitting with us and...’

‘We’ve talked about it before, Charlotte, with him as best man I was never going to sit at your table. He and Colin have known each other since they were eight, we’ve got to respect that. And it’s a shame I won’t sit with you but you know what, with hindsight that really is the worst thing about breaking up with him.’

‘Really?’

‘Really, Charlie, by a long way. But much though I love you I still wouldn’t get back together with him, not even for a seat at your high table. Is that alright?’

They gave each other a side hug on the sofa: it was typical of Elisabeth and Charlotte that, at this point, each felt she was being selfish towards the other, and neither of them was ever going to agree that she wasn’t in the wrong. 

The rest of the evening passed away in a flash, which by contrast made the next few weeks feel agonisingly slow. As she made her way back to London in the long awaited New Year Elisabeth realised she had never been so pleased to come back from a holiday, let alone from one in France. Her last couple of trips away with Mike had been a little dull and occasionally tense, sure, but this was in a different league altogether. She’d been terribly awkward around Jane. The poor thing needed more help than ever while Dan and Sophie did everyone’s heads in. They did not travel well, got up at five every single morning, were constantly nagging for their home comforts, wouldn’t eat Mamie’s amazing food, swore the Teletubbies were different than in London and just _too boooooring_ when the stupid things didn’t even speak in the first place, for god’s sake. 

Elisabeth did her best to help and give Jane some time off, but the twins exhausted and annoyed her in equal parts, especially with the weather too poor to get them outside much. Even their company, however, was better than the guilt of hiding from Jane what she knew about her MD promotion. She and Vincent assumed Elisabeth’s anxiety was to do with Tom, and teased her mercilessly about his return. She didn’t have the heart to disabuse them.

They left on Boxing day to spend time with the Bingleys in Kent, and then Elisabeth’s exhaustion abated, making room for depression, renewed frustrated anger at Toad, and also for a rising anxiety at the idea of her next meeting with Tom, made worse by the unusually long silence between them. 

Her spirits lifted as her ears popped when her Eurostar emerged from the tunnel, and the Kentish hills replaced the vast flat expanses of the Somme. The train was quiet, just her at a table of four, with a cup of surprisingly good coffee, the tragic death of Prince Andrei, and Napoleon’s sacking of Moscow. This did not make for the most cheery start to the new Millennium, but she had to admit that so far she was getting on with Leo Tolstoy unexpectedly well. She reset her watch while she waited for the district line. She could hope to get to the office by 8:30, done by nine, back home for ten, ten thirty? 

In the end it took less than half an hour to get to the office, and about five minutes to establish that, despite today’s YYYYMMDD starting in a two, Elisabeth’s old programs still performed their appointed task of a Bank Holiday morning, i.e. wrote a three-line log-file stating that no new data was available to update the research databases. 

What took far longer was to log in and out of four layers of security screening to document the exercise. Elisabeth had been dancing at a New Year’s Eve party in Paris until three o’clock in the morning, and the sleep deprivation was getting to her so that she almost lost her patience when she discovered at 8:35 that what stood between her and getting home was a lack of connection to any printer. She almost lost it again when the IT guy supposed to be “right on his way” to fix it took twenty minutes to make his way over, pizza slice in hand. And she lost it outright when she subsequently found out that the printer he’d connected her to was out of paper. In the end she managed to hand in twelve sheets of paperwork, duly signed-off, just after nine, and start at long last on her way home. 

But Transport for London was not on her side either, and having decided she’d be quicker on the tube she had to wait for one for ages. All of 12 minutes, but they felt like as many lifetimes. By this point there was no way she could have focused on Napoleon’s misdeeds. Prince Andrei’s body lay washed in his coffin, with Natasha, Sonya, Princess Maria and poor old Count Rostov weeping him. Elisabeth felt very sorry for him, and for the rest of them too, but ten times did she read the opening of the next chapter:

_‘It is beyond the power of the human intellect to encompass all the causes of any phenomenon. But the impulse to search into causes is inherent in man’s very nature.’_

and still it made no more sense to her than if she’d read it in the original. She marked the page with her Paris Metro ticket and gave up, fighting an urge to check the time yet again, and feeling her chest tighten as she approached Archway. Will he be in, will he be gone? What if he never showed up at all? And what if he did? How would she measure up to his memories of Sara _this time_? 

She made her way down an eerily quiet Holloway Road until she reached her glossy blue front door. She could see a light in the front room. She took off her gloves. She’d put her keys at the ready in her left pocket. 

She thought she recognised a couple of the bodies strewn around the lounge, studied them each in turn, but none of them belonged to Tom. He must have gone back home. Her anxiety abated, replaced by disappointment, and a sudden and brutal surge of exhaustion. Mac opened an eye, he’d not made it to his room but lay sprawled over the sofa with his mouth gaping, snoring away. She smiled and raised a finger to her lips, shushing him back to sleep, picked her bag up again and went off to her room. 

She opened her bedroom door, put her hand to her mouth and stopped breathing. She’d found him! She had found him! Tom was here! Right here in her bed, sleeping! Sleeping beautiful and happy, his shock of black hair grown and almost covering his eyes as he lay on his side, the duvet going up and down with his breathing. Even as she watched him from the doorframe she could almost feel his embrace again. Yes, he was right here in her very own bed, with his long body curled in and holding close that of a blondish girl, whose soft hair was covering her face, her chest rising and falling together with his. 

Someone’s hand was on Elisabeth’s shoulder: she gasped for air. Mac pulled Elisabeth back out of the room, just as the blond head started to stir. He closed the bedroom door carefully and marched Elisabeth back to the lounge. She heard noises coming from her room as Mac went to stand by the kettle, only taking his eyes off her for a second to switch it on. 

‘I’m sorry,’ he started again in a strained, high pitched sotto voce, then cleared his throat. ‘We meant to catch you before I… I’m sorry, I must have fallen asleep.’ 

‘Is that … Sara?’ Elisabeth heard herself say in a small voice. She had one hand to her mouth and with the other she was pointing across several walls to her bed. She was too shocked and tired to feel properly angry, and Mac didn’t know what to make of her detachment. He nodded, then looked away and set about making her the strongest instant coffee she’d ever drink, the kind of coffee that only people who don’t drink coffee can make. 

‘OK,’ she whispered, and went to the sink to add cold water in. She took a couple of sips, Mac still looking at her. 

‘Elisabeth,’ he said, leaning closer to her and keeping his voice down as some of the bodies in the room were beginning to stir, ‘your brother called, said you weren’t picking up your mobile. Can you call him back?’

Elisabeth took a step back: Mac’s morning breath was nothing to write home about. She took her mobile out of her back pocket. Three missed calls while she’d been on the tube, she should definitely have bused it. 

‘OK,’ she whispered politely, ‘I’ll just finish this lovely coffee and call him.’

Mac stayed rooted to the ground in front of her.

‘I’m fine,’ she nodded, raising her mug, ‘why don’t you go back up to your room for a proper sleep? I’m sorry I kept you up.’

‘No no, call him from my room,’ Mac whispered with a nod at the sleeping bodies in the lounge, and cleared his throat again: ‘but you’d better do it now,’ he said, treating her to another blast of his hung-over breath. She refrained from swaying back, and just stared at him, her brain still in shock, her face frozen in an expression of startled politeness.

‘’said it was urgent, sounded like it too, you’d better go,’ he continued, pointing up in the direction of his room. 

‘I’m sorry,’ he said again.

‘Stop saying that!’ she snapped, then remembered none of this was his fault. ‘I’m sorry, Mac, thanks for waiting up,’ she said, back to a detached whisper. 

He started rubbing his eyes and she went up to call Vincent. There was a feral smell up in Mac’s room, so she went to the window and opened it, and let the cold morning air stun what was left of her senses. Her brain still in tailspin, Elisabeth forgot that Vincent and Jane always spent New Year’s Eve at some posh hotel near Jane’s parents, and she dialled their home number. She’d just realised her mistake after about 8 rings and was about to hang up, when her brother picked up:

‘Aaaaaa-llo!’

‘Hé, mais ! Qu’est-ce que vous foutez a Londres?’

‘Elisabeth, finally, thank god, didn’t you get my voicemail? How soon can you get here?’

‘What? Why? What’s wrong?’

‘Jane: she’s at the Royal Free. Au pair’s still off, I had to drop her and get back here with the twins.’

‘Oh no! No no no no no no NOOOOOO!’

By the last one she was yelling, and the tears which downstairs would not come now welled up in her chest, then down all over her face.

‘Calm down, Elisabeth. Just take your bag, you haven’t unpacked yet? Just get yourself over here so I can go back there and see her - please!’ 

He sounded wobbly, something so rare it jolted her all over again, and she realised she’d just have to get a hold of herself, for the moment at least.

‘Sure.’

‘Get in a cab.’

‘Sure,’ she said again, ‘I’m on my way!’ 

She hung up on autopilot. By the time she got downstairs her face was a soppy sorry mess, her shoulders were heaving up and down, and she had no idea how to stop it. Images were chasing each other around her brain, of her weeping over Jane with Tom laughing on, and of her weeping over Tom with Jane laughing on. And why wouldn’t she? How stupid could she have been?

‘Mac?’ she asked in between sobs.

‘Yes?’

‘OK,’ she swallowed and made a conscious decision to try and breathe, ‘I need you to do two things for me.’

‘Of course.’

‘First I need you to call me a cab a.s.a.p.’

‘No prob.’

She repressed another urge to hyperventilate, blew her nose on a piece of kitchen towel, threw it away, and breathed out into her hands.

‘I have to go over and baby-sit: Jane’s not at all well.’

‘Sorry.’

‘And secondly,’

She let another sob go, breathed in, breathed out, took a sip of coffee. Still the flashbacks wouldn’t go away, of that blond head pressed into Tom’s chest. ‘Secondly when they’ve gone,’ she said pointing at the back wall of the lounge. She bit her lip until it hurt then breathed in and out again, her head tilted back so she wouldn’t meet Mac’s well-meaning eyes, ‘when they’ve gone please go in and change the sheets.’

There, well done! She bit her lip again and swallowed the next sob, which twisted angrily on its way back down.

‘I don’t care to see those ever again,’ she added, shaking her head, then gasped for air again, ‘There’s clean ones on the shelf in the wardrobe!’

Her voice was rising uncontrollably as the next sob rose up. She grabbed a fresh square of kitchen towel and wiped some more fat tears off her cheeks. Mac took another look at her and went up to his room to call her a cab. She wanted to blub so bad she had to wrap her hands around her midriff each time she forced a sob back down, and then gasp for air again with the misplaced eagerness of a landed fish. The flashbacks were pretty much constant now but she could not let herself cry any longer: within twenty minutes she’d have to keep it together for Vincent and the kids, so she’d better get used to this.

She splashed her face with cold water from the kitchen tap and went outside to wait for the cab, still holding on to her ribs.

‘Elisabeth, great, come in!’ said Vincent at the door. His face had a look of surprise, so she checked herself before realising he must simply be as stunned as she was. 

‘OK great!’ he said again, ‘You’re here, uh… I’ll go.’ he said, all the while rooted to the floor like some monumental idiot. The hall was the usual mess and the twins could be heard in the playroom. 

‘Tell me what happened, I don’t even know,’ Elisabeth said, tearing her mind away from one excruciating subject and onto another. But Vincent did not speak.

‘Is the baby…?’

‘We don’t know,’ he shook his head.

‘What happened?’

‘I don’t know, she complained of pains during the dance, even though we were just sitting there and not actually dancing. Then I guess she went to the loo and next thing I know she’s shaking my arm and saying that there’s blood. So we called the Royal Free and they said to come straight over. Offered to call an ambulance but we didn’t want to spook the kids, so we just packed up and drove there. I didn’t know whether to drive as fast as I could to just get her to the hospital quick, or slowly for the baby. And there was blood, Elisabeth. It’s still there on the passenger seat, they managed to stop it somehow after we got there, but it was hell, I mean dragging Sophie and Dan half asleep around the hospital... we just couldn’t stay. Thank god you’re here now so I can go back.’

‘You don’t know anything?’

‘They were doing more checks when I left, but we’re... She’s only 21 weeks, Elisabeth, I mean the twins were early but this is something else.’

‘21 is too early.’

Elisabeth recalled something about 24 being a threshold. Maybe Jane herself had told her. But even then it wouldn’t be pretty… Three weeks. 

‘OK,’ she said. Witnessing her brother’s disarray spurred her into action-mode, just as her own panic had done to Mac minutes before. ‘Bro, you need to put some shoes on and go. Now. I’ll call you a cab. Shit, you should have gone in mine!’ 

And with the picture of Tom and Sara’s heads at the back of her mind now joined by that of Jane bathed in blood, she went to the kitchen and called one of the numbers on the fridge. 

‘Ten minutes,’ she shouted to Vincent, who still stood rooted in the corridor. ‘Did she ask you to bring anything?’

‘I don’t know.’

Elisabeth ran around the house for the next ten minutes gathering things she thought Jane might need or like, and gradually becoming more aware of how much her head was hurting. 

‘Off you go,’ she said when the doorbell rang. ‘Break a leg, and call me, OK?’

‘Right.’

Elisabeth closed the door behind him, hoping against hope that he would manage to shape up a bit before getting there. Her own case was hopeless, a waking nightmare. Every few minutes she would revolt against the pictures flashing around her head: the small part of her mind, which still believed itself to be in control, demanded that she wake up. It fought heroically for her to wake up and escape, but then her eyes would fall back onto her bag in the hall, onto the twins, onto countless hateful markers of the reality of it all. They revealed to her the full hopelessness of her situation and it would take all her strength just to swallow another sob. She wondered how long she could carry on doing this before she stopped breathing altogether. 

Her phone buzzed in her back pocket, with a text message from another world, from Charlotte:

_Happy New Year!_

_Bet Ur far 2 busy w Tom_

_to rd this ;-)_

_xxoxx_ _C._

The children were still in front of the television. Elisabeth retreated to the kitchen to call her back, and finally let herself blub away.

The opening days of Elisabeth’s New Year were spent watching the twins, and very badly too. Under her regime they just sat and watched Dora the Explorer DVDs on a loop, shouting at the TV every time it was required, while feeding themselves dry Shreddies straight from one box each, to prevent fights. The hospital was being so accommodating, letting Vincent stay with Jane pretty much 24/7, that Elisabeth begun to worry that her latest little niece’s chances - they’d found out it was a girl - were probably grim. But officially at least, the medical staff remained non-committal in their prognosis. 

Elisabeth put her ill-procured downtime to good use, taking frequent breaks to weep her heart out in the downstairs toilet, all the while making sure that she could still hear the children howling “The map! The maaaaap!!!” in the playroom. She found at first that the physical act of crying was exhausting enough to be a respite from the ongoing mental torture. While her chest heaved, her eyes streamed and her tummy clenched she was, so to speak, in the moment: unable to focus on those images of Jane or Tom, which would otherwise swirl constantly in her mind. Inevitably though, the physical pain would in the end become as unbearable as the mental anguish it had replaced. Gasping for air, she would pick herself up and will her stomach to relax a little. Already Jane was back in her mind, dressed in a gory hospital gown and railing her for being so stupid as to let herself fall for Tom. 

Elisabeth hadn’t cried properly since Vincent had made her quit, at the age of six. Upon taking it up again she found that, for all that self-help nonsense floating around, there was in the long term nothing cathartic about it. Crying changed nothing, and it hurt. Therapy-wise, crying was as effective as it would have been to drive pins into her own nailbeds. So, just as almost a year earlier she’d given up smoking, she decided after two days to quit crying again, cold-turkey. And although it was impossible not to worry constantly about Jane, with Charlotte’s encouragement Elisabeth at least started to get a little angrier with Tom, and a little less with herself. 

By the time Jane’s mum arrived to take over Elisabeth still hadn’t managed to eat or sleep normally, but her eyes had been dry for nearly 24 hours. Mrs Bingley thought she looked terrible, but she was hardly looking bright eyed or chirpy herself. Vincent called just before Elisabeth left: things were stabilising, baby was still alive, but it looked like bed rest on the ward from here on for Jane.

Elisabeth was due back at work the next day so she went home to unpack, at last. The thought of going back to her room and her bed was almost too much to bear, and it was all she could do to walk in without her knees buckling under her. Once she got in though, to her surprise she laughed. She’d left some perfectly good sheets in the wardrobe but for some reason her flatmates had guilt-tripped themselves into buying her new ones. Shopping on the Holloway Road on the first of January had however yielded only the most horrid pink polyester duvet set, which against the walls’ already disgusting baby blue was simply puke-inducing. 

And they smelt of shop. 

At least they didn’t smell of Tom. She almost started crying all over again, but made a conscious effort to steady her breath and look at Charlotte’s last text instead. One friend like Charlotte, she reminded herself, was worth so much more than any number of smooth talking, two-timing Toms. And since she would have to talk to Ben and Mac at some point she decided she might as well do it now, and walked back into the lounge.

‘Was that all right?’ Mac asked when she got in.

‘It’s great, thanks,’ she lied, ‘Where on earth did you find those sheets?’

‘The Irish shop, only thing that was open.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Would you like a bacon sarnie?’

‘Well, since I haven’t eaten for a while now, and I’m going to reek of them anyhow.’

‘Excellent! Ben?’

Just then she noticed him on the sofa, and plonked herself next to him.

‘ ’you all right?’ he asked.

What did he think? Of course she wasn’t all right, but since he clearly wasn’t equipped emotionally for dealing with how she felt about his dear friend right now she spared him her real thoughts: 

‘Happy New Year, Ben. On the plus side it’s a girl, and if Jane hangs in there she might just be able to survive.’

‘Good!’ they both said, far too eagerly. 

‘You’re OK about Tom then?’ Ben asked a while later, then immediately looked away. She wondered for a second how much of an effort it must have taken him to get personal in a non-ironic fashion. Possibly almost as much effort as it was taking her to keep it together.

‘Well I wouldn’t say that I’m OK but…’ she thought what she’d been starting to think since she’d been bending Charlotte’s ear instead of sobbing uncontrollably behind toilet doors, ‘He always said he loved Sara, right? He never said anything else, and it’s not as if we were married or anything, he’s got every right to be with her if that’s what he wants. But am I pissed off with him? Yes. A lot.’

They were silent, Mac turning back from his bacon-frying to check on her a couple of times. But she was off: talking to Charlotte was one thing, but Mac and especially Ben had borne witness to Tom’s shameless flirting and she felt she needed their vindication before she could go back to the office tomorrow, and pretend to be fine about it.

‘What really bothers me is how he’s made me look like some complete idiot all this time. I was doing fine without him and if he was that into Sara he should have left me well alone!’

The guys turned to look at each other across the back of the sofa.

‘I don’t think it was like that,’ Mac started.

‘Oh really? What was it like then, exactly?’

‘They’re not…’ Ben moved his hands around with distaste, struggling for words, ‘...together.’ 

Elisabeth frowned. Not together? They’d looked pretty together in her bed.

‘She’s still with her gallery owner, I think,’ Ben added.

‘Good for her! And I care because?’

But of course she cared. She cared very much that Sara should hurt and humiliate Tom a fraction as much as he’d hurt and humiliated her. 

‘Come on, Elisabeth,’ Mac said, walking over to serve her sandwich, ‘I really don’t think he led you along.’

‘Did too.’

‘He didn’t even know she was coming! We didn’t, he’d just been going on and on about you. And then she just showed up about 4 o’clock or something. I mean, it was really late and we were all a bit pissed by then, to be honest.’

‘Tom was definitely pissed,’ Ben said, to his thumbs.

‘No one was expecting her. Really, no one. Why she showed up…’ Mac continued. 

Elisabeth sighed, and bit into the sandwich. Objectively, it was lovely, but eating anything more than the odd Shreddie was still difficult: food and repressed sobs just did not mix well in her stomach. Mac had time to finish his entire plate before she even got halfway through hers.

OK, she was thinking, so perhaps it wasn’t premeditated. Perhaps Tom just couldn’t help it that with her things were fun and flirty and superficial, and ultimately so awkward in bed he had to leave before daylight, while with Sara he could just slip into love and sleep a peaceful sleep curled up all around her like that. What did he say? Sara couldn’t be summed up in terms of hair and eyes and limbs, or something. Right, so this was what Sara could do, the quiet look of contentment on his face while he held her. It made perfect sense now. 

‘It’s OK, guys,’ she sighed. ‘I mean I could never make him this happy.’ 

She got up and put her empty plate in the sink, then went for a shower, and took her unrelenting headache off to bed in her stiff, smelly new sheets.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> copyright 2021 Mel Liffragh, all rights reserved.


	17. Win!

Amongst the dross of seasonal wishes, in her Inbox the next day she found an email from Paul, who wasn’t due back in until the Wednesday. It was dated 1st of Jan around 3am and said ‘Check out the Pravda!’ Not that she’d have much of a choice: _Win!_ was the default Intranet page at the office. You had to get past it first before you could get to Google. The front page today wished a Happy New Year to all at the bank and to their families, and showed pictures of the fireworks displays in Sydney, Tokyo and New York. In London, under the caption ‘Fresh Snow at the Christmas Party’, Paul had posted his picture of Toad snorting coke in the toilet.

This simply could not be happening. Elisabeth’s headache, which had abated slightly after her first three consecutive hours’ sleep this millennium, returned with a vengeance. She tried to ignore it and instead begun the painful process of deleting from her inbox every email she’d ever received from Tom, emptying her trash folder and then adding his address to her email filter, alongside Mike’s.

‘Check out _Win!_ ’ Newbie shouted at 7:16am. ‘Check this out!’ 

Soon he had the early shift of the back office around his desk.

‘That one’s definitely Toad!’ Newbie said, ‘But who’s the other one?’

‘Looks like that fat guy from marketing, what’s his name?’ said one not-exactly-slim-himself back office guy.

‘I wouldn’t know,’ said another one with a pout, ‘it’s not as if they ever come around here.’ 

‘He’s gonna be in so much trouble!’ Newbie laughed again. ‘Have you seen this, Lizzie?’

‘Yes I know, it’s terrible,’ she said, trying to sound shocked in a normal kind of way. 

She was in shock alright: they were fried. Totally fried. And not just Toad, oh no no no. Teflon-man would probably manage to argue he’d been framed or it wasn’t him or it was icing sugar or whatever. But Paul, definitely. And ergo his boss, i.e. her. With implacable logic her mind started to ponder how long it would be before IT came down from the fourth floor for her. 

Around 7:35 _Win!_ became unavailable, then reverted back to the pre-Christmas page. Elisabeth went up to the canteen, where the photo was all everyone was talking, or rather sniggering about.

‘Wonder who posted it?’

‘IT’ll soon find out.’ 

Yep, thought Elisabeth. I’m fried. Raj will never forgive me, breaching IT security, and pissing them off when we’re already treading such a fine line with them.

‘Did you see how fast they pulled it back? How embarrassing!’

‘Yeah, it’s bad press for IT.’

‘It’s bad press for Toad, and therefore for the whole bank.’

‘Ah who cares, it’s just a bit of fun!’

‘I hope he gets sacked. Deserves it a hundred times over.’ 

‘Happy New Year, Elisabeth,’ Will greeted her when she got back to the desk. They looked at each other with a puzzled frown for a minute. Elisabeth tried to figure what was different about him. He was late in by his own stringent standards, he looked tanned and glowing with health and, by his own stringent standards again, pretty relaxed. Hair different? 

‘You look well!’ she said in the end, only to put an end to the awkwardness. ‘Had a good break?’

‘Great, thanks, you?’

‘I’ve had better.’

‘Matey’s back from Estonia though, right?’

She looked down at her keyboard for a moment, and rubbed her aching temples. The traders would figure it out sooner or later so she might as well tell them now, take the inevitable ribbing, and be done with it. But then again she’d probably be sacked before the day was over so… oh, what the hell. It was strangely liberating, no longer being able to afford to care what happened to her from here on:

‘He is back, yes, but we are not...’

Sadly all her bravado evaporated the moment she faced Will, but she swallowed hard and made herself say:

‘We are not concerning ourselves with Tom anymore.’

Will cocked one eyebrow. There, it was out and she hadn’t blobbed, Charlotte would be proud. 

‘Really sorry, Lizzie,’ said Neil behind her. 

She turned to thank him. By the time she had done that Will was already busy typing.

‘Good call,’ she heard him say as she waited for tradePad to boot up. 

Sorry, what was that? She hadn’t been expecting anything like sympathy from him _,_ but come to think of it she had sort of expected a double macchiato. And she certainly hadn’t expected a raised eyebrow and a “Good call”. 

‘Yeah thanks, I don’t remember asking,’ she spat back, and shook her head at her screens. Which, sadly, did nothing to ease the pain in her temples.

‘Hey but look, don’t worry,’ Neil said from her other side. ‘IT will be thrilled to know you’re on the market again. Your little friend Khalil was here just now looking for you.’

Panic now mixed with pain and she winced: for Khalil to come by this early in the day they must be onto her. 

Already. 

In a way though, the only surprising thing about it, really, was that IT should come around rather than HR’s Angel of Doom - and her brown filing box. Like all terror-struck creatures Elisabeth detached herself from her fate. She watched with interest as a strange woman called Elisabeth Bennet went through the motions of dismissal for gross misconduct, and rather than fight for survival her brain started picking out the inconsistencies in the scenario playing out in front of her. 

‘Khalil’s not my little friend,’ she thought, and Elisabeth Bennet spoke the words.

‘He is when you need disk space,’ Will pointed out, to his screens.

‘What I meant is he’s not that short,’ Elisabeth Bennet shot back, also to her screens. She was pretty cool, that strange woman, considering.

Will seemed to agree: he turned back to her again and crossed his arms, smiling. His look was daring her to keep up the defiant front – which, sadly, she couldn’t. All of a sudden it all became real again. It was happening. To her. Of course Will, Neil, everyone must know. They must have seen Paul’s picture at the party. They knew and of course, right now they must delight in seeing her squirm, and look forward to her bitter end. For now Will contented himself with having made her look down and blush to her ears. He took his eyes off her and talked to Neil over the back of her head:

‘Right, Neil: so it’s no jokes about Estonians _or_ Pakistanis, OK? You won’t like her when she’s angry.’ 

‘Right on, boss,’ Neil replied, and smiled at her.

Minutes later Khalil was back and she went pale at the sight of him, a fact which was lost on neither of her neighbours.

‘Goth a minute?’ Khalil asked in his languorous Eastern plosives. 

‘Sure!’ she said, already wobbly at the knees.

‘Is Paul in?’

‘Back tomorrow why, do we need him?’ she asked, trying with admirable success to sound innocent. 

‘Perhaps, vee’ll see, maybe you’ll be able to clarify.’

This was agonising. Couldn’t they just shoot her and have done with it?

‘Shall we go to the atrium?’ she asked politely. 

‘Sure, yes.’

‘Did you have a nice break?’

‘Yes, you?’

‘Fine,’ she lied. However bad her Year 2000 had been so far, things were in all likelihood about to take a nosedive.

‘So, what can I do for you?’ she asked, hoping to sound half-way normal.

‘I’ve just had a qwery from Mike Poynton about your Vy-too-Kay testing.’

‘Y2K testing? Did I …’

“Did I hear this right?” was what she wanted to say, and sat there like a rabbit in headlights. 

‘Did I not fill everything in properly?’

‘Vell, it’s not that, but vee expected a testing plan for tradePad from Paul, and he hasn’t rrreturned anything.’

‘tradePad?’

She wanted to jump with joy. To run a victory lap around the atrium and then hug him. Her bestest friend Khalil proceeded to explain that, despite tradePad being over a month away from going live, his boss twice removed, Mike ‘Pointless’ Poynton, demanded that they file a “development testing protocol” by close of play today. 

Elisabeth now had her second out of body experience in a day. In a lifetime, come to think of it. She sat back, amazed at her own luck, while the woman sat across Khalil patiently discussed the intricacies of the protocol for filing development testing protocols, just as if irony or Kafka had never existed. 

Central IT were pissed off with her, she knew that. Pointless Poynton had never swallowed tradePad not being his, out of sheer territoriality and because he felt personally insulted that Raj did not deem him or his team smart enough to see it through. But if protocols for filing protocols was the worst he could throw at her then hell, she was getting off lightly and she knew it: 

‘I’ll check it out, Khalil, and we’ll put something together for you today, I promise. Wouldn’t want to upset internal audit,’ the strange woman concluded as Elisabeth watched on, incredulous. 

‘Thanks.’

‘No problem, I’ll drop everything else, should just about manage it this afternoon, it’s a good job you came by just now,’ she added for extra earnestness. 

Elisabeth was by now so impressed by the sang-froid of the woman seating across Khalil that she risked herself back into the conversation. 

‘I mean you guys must be all over the place with that _Win!_ thing this morning, right?’

‘Oh yes, Mike’s qwite worked up,’ Khalil nodded.

‘Do you have any idea what happened?’

‘Not yet, but vee’re looking into it.’ 

‘I see. Better get on with that testing protocol then!’

She got back to the desk, her head now not so much hurting as fizzing inside. Will asked whether everything was OK and she made suitably dismissive noises about tradePad and Y2K testing, and in Paul’s absence she rummaged around the New York servers for the US testing protocol, and spent the rest of the day running “Replace all”s in Word, and posting her new document onto half a dozen obscure corners of the bank’s computer network, two of which, she noticed, were write-only areas. 

The absurdity of her situation did not escape her, of course, as she filed multiple copies of supposedly risk mitigating testing procedures two days after her only direct report had hacked into the company’s intranet. But she’d be gone soon anyway, so for now she might as well do that, rather than anything useful. It would make a good story to tell the other burger-flippers at Mac Donald’s, assuming they gave her a job. 

No other bank ever would. 

Next morning, after another sleepless night she was met with the same absurd pretence of normality around the office. Will brought her her morning double macchiato, _Win!_ reported on the success of the Y2K test, Andy swore at the spreadsheet and she waited for Paul to show up, so she could give him the bollocking that he deserved before anyone else got a chance. 

‘Paul, 3.11 please.’

‘Bonne Année, Elisabeth!’

‘3.11, it’s about tradePad’s Y2K testing, I need to catch you up’, she said as Neil walked in and wondered at her sharp tone.

‘Sure, boss!’ Paul replied in his effeminate sing-song. He pranced ahead into the meeting room.

‘Right,’ she said as soon as the door was shut, ‘I suppose you’re proud of yourself?’

‘Did you like it?’

‘No I didn’t! I haven’t slept a wink! It’s only a matter of time before they find out you did it, and then we’re both sacked, so thanks very much!’

‘Was he in yesterday? Did he see it?’

‘No he wasn’t, I’m not sure if he was supposed to be, word was he was working from home.’

‘Working from home!’ Paul laughed, then carefully patted his blond hair back. 

‘Paul, what do you suppose you’re going to say when HR come over for us in a minute?’

‘Nothing! Zey won’t!’ he said with a childish smile.

‘Look, I’m very impressed with you hacking into _Win!_ and all that, but I’m sure it’s traceable.’

‘That’s right, it is.’

‘What the…?’

‘I did it remotely under Toad’s login, he left ’is Citrix access key in ze toilet after zey did ze coke.’

‘What?!’

‘And everyone knows he uses “password” as his password. His PA was telling me. She was a little tipsy, at the Christmas party, we got talking about her shoes... So anyway I logged in as him, and zen I used our US admin login to edit ze page.’

‘We have a US admin login?’

‘You know Abou, right?'

Of course she did, he was one of Raj's uber geeks over in New York. His Dad was from Cameroon so he'd not only taught her everything she knew about making tradePad happen here, he'd done it _en francais dans le texte_. 

'Abou used to work on the UNIX team before he joined Raj,' Paul was saying, 'and zey never disabled his admin rights. Zis way he looks after the tradePad servers in New York, and here out of hours, it’s just easier for everyone.’

‘I see,’ she said, breathing as if she’d just finished a marathon, and shaking her head with disbelief. Disbelief at the large scale circumvention of IT security, of course, but mostly at the fact that they would, in all likelihood, get away with it.

‘But hang on, won’t they pin it on Abou then?’

‘No worries, I also messed with ze log files on zee access record. I did it from a friend’s place in Neuilly: zey won’t be able to trace it at all, don’t worry, only zat Toad logged in around zat time.’

‘Paul, you’re dangerous! Do you realise what you’ve done?’

‘What? I sought you ’ated ze guy?’

‘Of course I do! Believe me, I do!’ she repeated with a fond thought for Jane, and a terrified one for Justine from HR and her brown filing box of doom. ‘But look: IT already hate us, Toad already hates us, if you’ve left so much as a shred of evidence out there that it’s you, we are absolutely fried. Now and forever, here and everywhere in the City. And in New York, Boston, San Francisco, Tokyo, you name it. Blackballed. Unemployable. Guaranteed.’

‘But I haven’t,’ he said haughtily: ‘Zis access record system is a sieve. It’s a joke - ridiculous.’

Despite the dramatic circumstances Elisabeth couldn’t help wondering whether to explain to him how self-defeating the word “ridiculous” is, when spoken in London in a Monty-Pythonesque French accent. 

‘You forget one thing, Paul,’ she said instead, ‘how many people besides me know you took this picture?’

‘Just a couple of ze guys, and zey were all drunk.’

‘Will wasn’t.’

‘Zey won’t talk, zey all ’ate him.’

‘Of course they do! But it doesn’t mean we want to give them one over us.’

‘No big deal.’

‘But it is, Paul! Of course it is! How can you not see that?’

‘It was just a bit of fun!’

‘Yes, the kind of fun that could leave us both unemployed because let me tell you: management, meaning Raj, will completely wash their hands of us if we’re found out. So are you certain you’re not traceable?’

‘But of course!’

One half of her couldn’t help smile at Paul’s comedy Frenchness as he said this. The other half knew she should be smacking his ear. This must be what it felt like for Jane whenever Sophie was being naughty. 

‘OK in that case, Paul, I want you to deny this at all costs should it ever get raised by anyone. Anyone, you hear me? Trust no one one this. And I'll deny it too.'

He nodded.

'And I don’t ever want you to go hacking around again without my permission. Understood?’

‘All right!’ he said sulkily, ‘Jesus! Why d’you get so worked up?’

This time Elisabeth didn’t let herself soften: she read him the riot act about staying whiter than white in all his dealings with central IT. She also updated him on the Y2K development test protocol she’d just filed. Strangely, about that Paul did look genuinely contrite:

‘Sorry, boss, I should have done it.’

‘It’s fine,’ she said. ‘Let’s just get back to it, OK?’

‘Do you want a coffee?’

‘Yes please! Oh and of course everyone thought it was very funny.’

Paul smiled and made to leave, but turned back with his hand already on the door handle.

‘Oh and uh, thanks, boss, you know, for getting that job for Frank.’

Elisabeth frowned. It took her a while to remember that evening last year, before her whole world had come crashing down, when Charlotte had called to complain that her wedding florist had let her down for a subsequent but more glamorous engagement. Elisabeth had volunteered Paul’s boyfriend for the job and Charlotte had been sceptical at first. But she’d warmed up to the idea when Elisabeth had explained that back in Paris Frank was go-to florist to both Catherine Deneuve and Vanessa Paradis. And that the latter was Johnny Depp’s nearly-new squeeze. So now Charlotte had taken Frank on, which would give him a chance to make his floral mark on London, and might therefore make Paul happy to stick with his own job. 

‘Right, so Charlotte’s hired him then?’

‘It was really nice of you to recommend him, boss.’

‘No problem at all: I can’t wait to see his work. You know Charlotte buys a lot of corporate flowers, right?’

‘Really?’

He smiled and off he went again, mincing towards the back staircase, while Elisabeth walked back to the desk and sat down with a sigh of relief. Neil was off, probably at the canteen too.

‘Duly chastised?’ Will asked without taking his eyes off his screen.

‘Are you talking to me?’

‘No, I’m chewing a brick, as Yoda would say.’

He turned to her, and gave her the same dark teasing look he’d given her earlier. But this time she looked him right back in the eye without so much as flinching. 

‘Did you give him a good bollocking then?’ he asked again. 

‘Sorry, I really don’t know what you’re talking about. Unless it’s that our Y2K testing protocol?’

She raised a didn’t-think-so eyebrow and made to get back to work. He didn’t budge but never mind, she kept her eyes on her screens.

‘You know, I was in the lift with your little friend Khalil just now. Apparently they drew a blank on that _Win!_ thing, something about some files missing and backups failing?’

‘What are you talking about?’ she lied again, grabbed her pencil and tucked her hair back.

‘You’re a terrible liar, Elisabeth. Look at you, you just tucked your hair back.’

‘What?’

‘OK, all right. So this is the official party line, then?’

‘Absolutely! What?’

‘We know nothing about this?’

‘Correct. Who else do you think knows nothing about it?’

‘Just me and Neil. We didn’t actually see the picture, just overheard you two talking about it.’

‘I see. Can we arrange for some collective amnesia?’

‘Elisabeth, you’re safe with us.’

She briefly turned to face him: he smiled, then it hit her. That’s what was different: he hadn’t used Lizzie yet. Better not mention anything and jinx it. 

‘Thanks!’ she smiled, not sure what to be more relieved about. She turned back to her notepad. ‘Not that I know what you’re talking about.’

‘Don’t mention it.’

‘Me? I wasn’t.’

‘Fuckin’ spreadsheet’s playin’ up again. Where’s the fairy?’ Andy barked from across the screens. 

‘Watch it, Andy. He’s called Paul,’ Will said. 

‘Sure, boss.’

‘Good, thanks.’

‘Paul’s upstairs getting the coffees, can I help you?’ Elisabeth asked. 

‘It’s fuckin’ broken again!’

‘OK sorry, I’ll have a look.’

‘Thanks, Elisabeth,’ she heard as she got up to see to Andy’s spreadsheet.

They never did get to have their Friday meeting with Toad but, unlike Wavy, he was spared the iniquity of having to pack up his own brown filing box. Unaware of her role in his demise, his PA of fifteen years cleared his desk with a tear in her eye, and had the box couriered over to his Harpenden mansion. Then the next day an email went out announcing that Christopher Appleby had decided to retire to further his involvement in industry-wide representation at the National Association of Pension Funds and on the FTSE committee, and to spend more time with his family and on the golf course. Sir Phillip, Chairman of the Board, wished him every success with these exciting new plans.

Elisabeth should have rejoiced, but she was still so busy kicking herself over Tom that she hardly even smiled when she read about it. For days after the announcement there was a definite sense of elation around the UK office, which she felt sadly unable to share into. She was too raw to cheer, and whilst exposed to all the risks of Paul’s enterprise she didn’t think she deserved any credit for its success. Besides, Toad’s sacking, though revenge of a sort, was no retribution for his misdeeds. It came far too late to make any difference to Jane’s fate, or to the countless others he’s trodden over on his glorious way to the top. 

As for Jane, she missed the email altogether, being stuck in hospital until further notice. Much like Toad, the bank’s private health insurance viewed childbearing as self-inflicted, avoidable damage, but she’d managed to squeeze some pregnancy cover out of Vincent’s. So now at least she was getting bored out of her wits in a sunny private en-suite room near St John’s Wood, rather than on a ward at the Royal Free. Jane continued to bear her trials with incredible good humour, sporting the same quiet smile Elisabeth had seen on her at the spa. Her mum and sisters all shared Jane’s penchant for logistics, and had the visiting and babysitting rota down to a fine art. Elisabeth’s visiting slot was Thursday night, which was when she appraised Jane of the manner of Toad’s dismissal:

‘I’m not sure about Neil, but I do worry about Will,’ Elisabeth concluded sombrely, ‘I do know for a fact that he’s onto us.’ 

She had only meant to try and cheer Jane up with the news, not to worry her with her lingering fears of being found out. Mrs Bingley had been very clear that her daughter was to be distracted, but not unduly worried. Elisabeth should therefore have known better than to explain her part in Toad’s sacking. Thanks no doubt to the pregnancy hormones, Jane was uncharacteristically sanguine about it all:

‘Will?’ she asked lightly, ‘What Will? The Will you go out for sneaky smokes with? I wouldn’t worry about him.’

‘Hey?’

‘That’s right, what with all this,’ Jane said with a desultory wave at the silicone pipe-work she was plugged into, ‘I never got to ask you: did you or did you not snog Fitzwilliam Kingsley-Darcy at the Christmas party?’

‘What?!’

‘Did you?’

‘Seriously, Jane, are you insane? You’ve been reading too many silly mags in here, you know, you should be reading proper stuff.’ 

‘Should I take this as a no then?’

‘Please do, please take it as a very, very firm no.’

‘Really? You know it’s not just me who saw you coming back in wearing his jacket. The next day the girls in Compliance and in Market Data started an email hate-group with your name on it.’

‘Oh so that’s what they do all day!’ Elisabeth joked, horrified. 

‘I hadn’t thought about it on the spot but it’s true, you know: you two looked kind of, I don’t know, dreamy when you came back in.’

‘We didn’t look dreamy.’

‘He did.’

Elisabeth frowned, but soon concluded that if Will had indeed been lost in thoughts, then it would have been about what a basket case the desk quant was turning into. And fair enough. But since she could hardly explain to Jane what had actually happened she tried her best to shrug it off.

‘He was probably just freezing, it was a cold night.’

‘True, but why did you look like you’d seen a ghost?’ Jane insisted, pointing at her. 

‘I was pissed.’

‘You?’

Bother. Of course Jane knew her far too well to buy that. But there was no way Elisabeth could tell her how she’d really ended up out there with Will -and now, as it turned out, at the centre of the most unlikely tale ever to feed the bank’s great rumour mill. She stuck with her story to the last:

‘Drinking games. I lost. Terrible. He just had to get me out before I got sick... God, I’m never doing that again!’ she said, rolling her eyes.

Jane frowned at her, thinking hard whether to believe her. 

‘See this is why I shouldn’t drink, I always seem to end up barfing in front of the wrong people,’ she added for good measure. 

To joke about that fateful night with Tom felt so excruciating that it almost broke her poor raw heart all over again. But she had calculated that by bringing up an association which Jane would know to be so painful, she might lend some veracity to her latest piece of fiction. Indeed Jane looked both convinced and amused:

‘Well, if you barfed in front of Will you’re probably quite safe from ever having to snog him.’ 

‘Yeah, I think I was pretty safe from that already, but thanks. It’s him ratting on me I’m more worried about.’

‘He would have done that already, Elisabeth, if he was going to.’

‘You’re right,’ she sighed. It was a good point, and her fears did abate. When Jane did not say anything she sighed again, this time about Tom, of course, who’d just crept into her thoughts as he did, still, whenever her brain was idle for even a second. How could she have been so stupid?

‘Do you want to talk about him?’ Jane asked very gently. She looked so kind and dignified despite the drip and the hospital gown: her stoicism almost brought tears to Elisabeth’s eyes again. And it put her to shame too: here she was feeling sorry for herself over some stupid jerk when poor Jane was stuck between these four pink walls, fighting for her baby’s life. 

‘No, let’s not,’ Elisabeth said, ‘Let’s talk about you. I was worried you’d be down but you’re amazing, you know. I wish I knew how you keep it together.’

‘The baby’s alright,’ Jane smiled, ‘That’s the main thing, what does it matter if I miss a launch or a promotion?’

Elisabeth’s eyes widened, so she lowered them and hoped that Jane would not spot her awkwardness. Why should she bring up MD promotions now, of all times?

‘Why should you miss your promotion?’ Elisabeth asked, thinking that this would have been what she would have asked if she hadn’t already known that Jane had indeed already missed her promotion. Her brain really was hurting now. 

‘Oh come on, Elisabeth. I’m going to be stuck here throughout the committee stage, Nigel will put his name on the press release I’ve already written - it’s not going to happen,’ Jane said with amazingly lightness.

‘Has anyone said as much to you?’

‘I don’t need them to, and it really doesn’t matter anyway.’

‘You’re right, you’re right,’ Elisabeth said, trying her best to emulate Jane’s hormone-induced positivity. ‘There’s always next year; greater scheme of things you’ll still be one of the youngest MDs, right?’

‘I don’t think I’ll be there next year either,’ Jane said, smiling on. 

‘Oh? Are you gonna take a full year off after all? I thought your boss wanted you back a.s.a.p.’

‘I’m not sure I will go back at all,’ Jane said, with an umpteenth pat on her bump, ‘Not to this bank, not to any bank. Not until this one is at school anyway.’

Elisabeth sat gaping for a while, too shocked to say anything. This didn’t make sense. OK, Jane was high on happy hormones right now but... and now Jane let out a peal of her delightful laughter. 

‘Oh, you were kidding, right. Phee-ew!’ Elisabeth said, and forced a feeble laugh. Between this and the innuendos about Will she was beginning to think that Jane’s sense of humour was getting a little warped. Who could blame her? She must be getting stir-crazy stuck in here.

‘I’m not kidding, Elisabeth. I’m just laughing at your face,’ Jane continued just as cheerfully. 

‘What?! Are you...’

“Mad” was going to be her next word, but she stopped herself in time and managed to finish with “sure” instead, then pretended to cough.

‘Not yet, no. It’s just a thought for the moment. Please don’t tell anyone, of course.’

‘Of course not, but why?’

‘I’ve been thinking, I’ve really taken Dan and Sophie for granted until now, I’ve only just started realising how much I’ve missed out on since they were born.’ 

Yes like, in Elisabeth’s humble experience as a mere auntie, wiping bottoms, liquidising food and then scraping it off kitchen walls, putting the lids back on abandoned felt tips and watching dreadful toddlers TV. This just wasn’t rational – Elisabeth could only put it down to the hormones. Seriously, who would want to do an au-pair’s job for no money, when they could do Jane’s and get paid for it?

‘Well as you said it’s an idea, right? You just keep thinking about it.’

‘I will. How’s Charlotte’s wedding coming along?’ 

Jane had signalled her desire to drop the subject and Elisabeth was only too glad to oblige her, but as the weeks passed and Jane stuck with her crazy plan it started to bug her more and more. 

For a start, Jane couldn’t convince Elisabeth that her choice wasn’t motivated by guilt, rather than by true enthusiasm. Even taking motherly instincts into account, she just couldn’t picture Jane having fun wiping poo and yogurt all day, and hanging out with the other yummy mummies after playgroup. 

From the great height of her postgraduate degree, and with her own Mum having stuck to her teaching job with no adverse effects on either of her children, Elisabeth had always viewed stay-at-home-mums with not-so-benign contempt. She knew that probably made her snooty but come on: they must just be too dull or too lazy to come up with anything better to do with their time, right? In fact, in this age of hard-fought equal opportunities, were not stay at home mums an insult to the feminist cause? Did they not, in a way, deserve to be frustrated, desperate housewives? This fate was not one that Elisabeth had ever wished on her dear Jane, or ever would. 

It was probably all Vincent, egging her on: he would love nothing more than for his wife’s daylight hours to be dedicated to his family’s happiness, rather than to that of some coke-snorting boss. But did he realise that if Jane left the bank then they would probably never send a young mother to an MD off-site? Jane Bennet-Bingley wasn’t just his wife, for goodness’ sake; within the bank she was an anomaly, and therefore an emblem. The only woman MD in London to date was a 45-year-old childless divorcee, whose figure hair and dress-sense made Ann Widdecombe look like a glamour-puss. With Jane gone who would ever prove that it was possible to have it all? And if Jane Bennet-Bingley couldn’t have it all, with all her wit, poise, determination and hard work, then who on earth could? 

Hang on, what if... what if nobody could? 

No no no, that just couldn’t be. It must be the hormones. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> copyright 2021 Mel Liffragh, all rights reserved.


	18. Deja vu

Far too little changed over the following weeks. 

On the positive side, tradePad was coming along fine, and Elisabeth was grateful for each day Will brought her her morning macchiato, didn’t call her Lizzie and kept schtum about Paul’s Christmas photo. 

Sadly the bad stuff didn’t go away either: Jane was still stuck in hospital and Elisabeth still couldn’t stop kicking herself for having put her idiotic faith in Tom. 

She thought of him countless times daily, each time with a twang of physical pain. It started when Will walked in with a coffee for her and didn’t interrupt an email exchange, and it only stopped when she finally managed to get to sleep without speaking to him. She went swimming almost every night now, so that she wouldn’t have to sit in the flat and be tempted to answer the phone, in case it was him. Even Sunday night pancakes were a bit of a chore now: Ben and Mac still ate them cheerfully enough, but she couldn’t even add flour to eggs without thinking of how she had done that with Tom, and what a silly, silly flirt she’d been. 

Elisabeth felt at least as stupid as she felt angry about the whole thing. She should have known she’d never measure up to Sara. Now what she desperately longed for was her old, solid self. She had forgotten what it was like not to be obsessed with Thomas Wickham Lorcan Geroge Reilly and that wasn’t only painful, it was scary. She could not begin to understand it, and worried whether there would ever be an end to it, a point in the future when she’d stop feeling so stupid, and used, and lonely. On Thursday nights she would go and visit Jane at the hospital, and be reminded that compared to her she didn’t have any problems worth moaning about, and come back determined to get a grip, and then fail to, and then hate herself some more over that. 

Then on Saturday, January 29th, Elisabeth pulled a pink dress out of her wardrobe. This was the dress Jane had made her buy for Charlotte’s wedding back in November. This was the dress Tom had made fun of as he’d glimpsed at it the night of Mac’s party. This was the dress she’d shown Charlotte when she’d visited before Christmas. Happy days... 

Today it was cold outside. A hard wind was blowing wisps of white clouds across a background of higher, milky grey ones. Rain could not be far, and holding the hanger in front of her chest Elisabeth felt like that shopping trip last year had taken place not just in a different year, century or millennium, but in a different universe altogether: a universe where being single hadn’t felt nearly as daunting as it did now, and where Jane had very occasionally been free to walk about the West End’s shops looking at pretty things.

Pink had seemed like a good idea at the time. Elisabeth wanted to go for a more sober dark green, but Jane had convinced her that green would make her look even paler, and that pink was a much more suitable colour for a wedding. The dress was short and slinky, like most things this winter. Jane had pointed out how lucky Elisabeth was that it would show off her long legs so nicely. She had also made her buy some sort of cropped tweedy jacket in a very light grey with a pink trim and mother of pearl buttons, which Elisabeth had thought looked horrid, until Jane had pointed out that it went both with the dress and across Elisabeth’s swimmer’s shoulders. 

Jane had promised she’d sort out her hair, and lend some accessories and make-up on the day, but since that was no longer happening Elisabeth just got dressed by herself and, having looked at herself in her wardrobe mirror, grew nervous. She looked absurd: her body that of some girly complete stranger, her head the familiar one of a short haired, bespectacled City worker. She thought of changing into her business suit, the “client presentation” suit. That one went with her face and she knew she’d feel much more at ease in it, but charcoal grey was hardly appropriate for the occasion, and the whole point of today was to try and do Charlotte proud. 

She did deserve a bit of an effort, good old Charlotte, who aside from Leo Tolstoy had been Elisabeth’s only lifeline these last four weeks. Even with her own wedding looming Charlotte still called every couple of days to check on her, and watched with the patience of a saint as Elisabeth failed to eat up most of the meals they went out for. Charlotte loved the grey-pink combo, which was probably why she herself hated it, but for friendship’s sake Elisabeth now put the jacket on and set off, best foot forward, sticking out like a sore thumb on the Holloway Road’s pavement on a darkening Saturday afternoon. 

Things kicked off with a religious ceremony at St Mary Woolnoth on Lombard Street, which being about fifty yards from both the Bank of England and Barclays’s headquarters had never struck Elisabeth as the most romantic place to celebrate a lifetime’s union. The exit of the Bank tube was eerily quiet: in all her years of commuting she had never heard her own steps resounding in the station’s empty corridors. There were no grey-suited throngs to fight on the way to the church either. Elisabeth settled herself into a discreet seat around the back and took a curious look to the front. 

That summer Posh and Becks had got married first in matching white, then in matching purple, with thrones. Well never mind them: Charlotte Lucas-soon-to-be-Williams was going with a white and platinum colour scheme. That’s right: those space-age cummerbunds around the ushers waists weren’t tin-foil, they were not silver either, they were _platinum_. Charlotte had tracked them down on the internet and had them shipped from the US, together with matching belts and Alice bands for her bridesmaids. 

Claire, Charlotte’s very big sister, and Jenny, her very lean step-sister, were doing an outstanding Stan and Ollie impression in their bridesmaid dresses. White was terribly unflattering both to Jenny’s complexion and to Claire’s figure, but at least Claire was, like her sister, a naturally flamboyant dresser, and she had not only embraced the flashy Alice band and belt, but also gleefully squeezed her calves into a pair of flat silver boots. By contrast Jenny, whose natural dress sense was more librarian than Space/Spice Girl, seemed both cold and mortified as she tugged on the short sleeves of her dress. 

Elisabeth smoother the skirt of her own dress and tried for a more positive take on things. Why not look at this as a white and bling wedding, only one done to perfection, Charlotte-style? Even in her dejected frame of mind Elisabeth had to own that everyone did look bright and cheery today in their shiny accessories, ready for the party to end all parties. Everyone, that is, but herself: would it kill her to try for a bit of bright and cheery herself? No it wouldn’t: in fact it might do her a power of good. 

Mercifully the sermon, like the bride’s dress, was of the short and flattering variety, and a rumour started going around while they showered the newlyweds in custom-made, glittering, “C&C” monogrammed confetti at the church gates, that Charlotte had struck a deal with the priest whereby her Church donation would be inversely proportional to the length of his homily. 

The downside of this otherwise highly practical arrangement was, that the time thus saved was used by some celebrity magazine photographer friend of Charlotte’s to finesse a fancy-lit outdoor photo shoot of the wedding party in nearby Leadenhall Market. He didn’t mind that the night was turning bitterly cold, and that fat white shreds of winter sky had started to fall on the waiting guests: he was shooting from behind the fur trim around the hood of the most enormous bright yellow parka ever made, out of which stuck only his matching yellow moon-boots, and a pair of cut-off woolly gloves. 

The bride meanwhile couldn’t believe her luck in securing an actual white wedding, and smiled blissfully in her little dress, little shoes and a minuscule feathery shrug, impervious to the cold, crowned in cubic zyrconia and glorious snowflakes, and all the while probably thinking something along the lines of: take that, Posh Spice, you skinny cow. 

And good for her. Ever the true professional, Charlotte had ordered three huge vats of steaming mulled wine to be served to her wedding party, and to a few puzzled weekend City stragglers drawn in by the sweet tones of the Brazilian steel-drummers she’d hired for a rendition of Pachelbel’s Canon.

‘Elisabeth, Elisabeth come here! Come!’ Charlotte shouted from afar, waving and jumping in her high heels, just as Elisabeth’s hands started to thaw around a silver, sorry platinum, paper cup. They’d just finished shooting the best man and bridesmaids and Elisabeth saw Mike and Rachel file way away from the photographer’s umbrella lights. She approached tentatively, blinking in their glare.

‘Oh, Elisabeth, isn’t this great!’ Charlotte said, and almost smothered her in thirteen stones of fragrant, cream-silk-wrapped enthusiasm. 

‘Charlotte, it’s just perfect. I’m so happy for you!’ said Elisabeth, forgetting all about her painfully frozen toes. The photographer’s blinding lights were much harder to ignore:

‘Smile! Here-a, please, darrrrlings!’ he called in cool, stern Italian. 

‘Look at him, look at him!’ Charlotte laughed, and changed her grip to give Elisabeth a vigorous side-on hug while smiling away at the camera.

‘No! Take-offa zee glasses. Please!’ the yellow photographer said, throwing his hands up and starting to tut. 

‘Leave her alone! She’s my friend and she’s perfect as she is!’ Charlotte shot back, at which Elisabeth’s face finally relaxed and smiled at the flashlights. 

‘Oh and by the way, I have a surprise for you,’ Charlotte whispered in her ear before she was shooed away, ‘Hope you like him, but you can thank me later – love you!’

The wedding party made its way in dribs and drabs, on foot across London Bridge. The photographer and his entourage stopped everyone halfway across the Thames to set up the umbrella lights again and take a couple more urban shots against the backdrop of lit-up Tower Bridge. Eventually they all reached a huge, warmly lit, red brick wine cellar not far from Borough Market, and as Elisabeth found her seat for dinner the meaning of Charlotte’s last remark became evident:

‘Good evening! I’m Frederic Stanton-Morley.’

‘Nice to meet you: Elisabeth Bennet.’

‘As in Bennet, Brunswick & Cunningham, FAJ 1994, right?’

FAJ being geek for the venerable but exceedingly dry _Financial Analysts’ Journal_ , this guy was either a fellow geek, or else a scarily well-informed stalker. But he didn’t look like either, he just looked like a bit of a toff, except an incredibly good-looking one. He wasn’t handsome in a Kingsley-like, after-shave-ad fashion, he was more of a Michelangelo beauty, with a roman nose and gorgeous large blue eyes, bordered by the sort of long dark lashes that most girls in the room would have given their right arm for. 

‘Uh yes, that’s me alright. How did you...’

‘Charlotte told me I might have read some of your stuff. I had, actually,’ he said, smiling as if that was anything to be proud of. 

Elisabeth smiled politely back and before she sat down she looked around and caught Charlotte’s eye at the high table. The bride raised her threaded eyebrows and pointed in Frederic’s direction with a knowing smile and a none too subtle nod. Wow, trust Charlotte to go and find her a single, posh, attractive quant. She didn’t feel a bit like it but Elisabeth now realised she owed it to herself, and to the bride, to try and at least flirt with the guy. 

‘How come it doesn’t say Dr E. Bennet on your place card then?’ he asked.

‘Almost certainly because I haven't got a PhD: our Charlotte would never miss something like that, believe me.’

‘But you’ve published, what, three, four papers?’

‘Mostly Ian Brunswick did when he was my boss. They were all his idea: I just did the numbers and the writing up. I remember he kept telling me to get married to Mike so my name would stop coming before his.’

‘I can’t believe you actually know Ian Brunswick,’ Frederick said, clutching the table with one hand while loosening his tie with the other. Elisabeth swayed back to make room for his excitement. 

‘Yeah, he gave me my first research job, he was my tutor back at...’

‘What’s he like?’

‘I don’t know,’ she shrugged, trying to think about it: ‘Perfectly nice, infuriating, changed his mind every five minutes, you know, never ever made decisions, couldn’t spell for toffee – standard head of research material,’ she said indifferently, and saw poor Frederic’s face fall. ‘Oh but yeah, no, he’s really really clever!’

‘I’m finishing my PhD at UCL,’ he said, ‘Econometrics, with Bertrand Viallet – do you know him?’

‘No.’

‘Really? He was one of the first to apply cointegration in a financial context.’

‘You don’t say?’ 

Or rather, she was already beginning to wish he would stop saying. She thought of how often she’d moaned to Charlotte that she never got to meet people she could discuss her job with. What a fool! It was nice that Frederic understood what she did all day, and it was even nicer that he seemed unaware of how good looking he was. But what on earth made him think that she wanted to discuss cointegration on her night off?

‘And Bertrand’s French of course. Didn’t Charlotte say you were French?’

‘I am a bit, yes.’ 

‘He’s really, really good. He’s really big in Fixed Income,’ Frederick said, with the kind of “phwoar” tone the back office guys put on to discuss car engines. 

‘That’ll be why I don’t know him: I’m more of an equity person, don’t know anything about fixed income, really,’ she said, exaggerating her ignorance in an attempt to close the subject.

‘We’re working on copulas,’ Frederick explained, undeterred.

‘I see.’ 

She didn’t, but if it was anything like cointegration then he should stop now. 

‘Have I met you at an _Inquire_ conference before?’

‘Possibly...’

By the end of the main course Frederic was still busy explaining to her how joint cumulative probability distributions, and hence copulas, were used in pricing Collateralized Debt Obligations, i.e. bets on bets on loads of mortgages defaulting at the same time. To Elisabeth those sounded like the recipe to bigging up the next financial crash, but to Frederic they were just good old-fashioned econometric porn. Hence she was almost glad when she saw Mike rise up at the high table and adjust his platinum bow-tie. Ah yes, best man’s speech. That meant the meal was nearly over, and then hopefully she could get Frederic to shut up, take his impeccable suit jacket off, and start dancing. 

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ Mike started, and cleared his throat while waiting for the hum of conversation to ebb away. Silence spread from the high table at the front to the lowest ones at the back, and Mike started again: 

‘Ladies and gentlemen, I will always remember the day Colin told me he’d just proposed to our lovely Charlotte. I’m afraid my faith in womankind was at an all time low: a week before my girlfriend of seven years had cleared out of our flat, leaving me a note on the kitchen table to say she was off to New York because she needed “time to think”...’

‘Ooooooooh....’ went the whole cavernous room’s sympathy, right on cue while he paused for breath or, more likely, for effect. 

Charlotte shot Colin what was by her standards an exceptionally dark look, and then a strange thing happened. Mike carried on talking about how news of his oldest friend’s engagement to the most incredible ... etc. etc., but instead of looking at him a few people at the front tables started to turn around to check the back of the room. Elisabeth turned around and checked the back wall too, expecting perhaps a repeat of the fancy slide show they’d projected there earlier. 

But no: the screen was still rolled up, the brick wall just boringly... bricky. Elisabeth turned back to the front again and when she did she saw the look-backs spread like a Mexican wave. One or two people at each table would nod back and then the rest of their table would do the same, then the next table, and the next, until the wave reached the two tables immediately in front of hers and she was left in no doubt that they were all copping a good look at her. She thought of running to the loo, or at least hiding her burning cheeks behind her napkin, but in the end she just carried on sullying the Lord’s name under her breath together with the best man’s, while looking straight at the high table. 

‘So to paraphrase the immortal bard,’ Mike went on with unselfconscious banality, ‘let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment.’

‘Do you know him?’ Frederic asked, whose exalted mental faculties did not stretch to building an understanding of the situation.

‘It wasn’t like that,’ she muttered, and re-crossed her arms and her legs.

Elisabeth knew she shouldn’t, but after that delightful interlude the only thing for it was alcohol. She started with knocking back Frederic’s champagne as well as her own over the wedding cake (white and silver, sorry platinum), then sent him to the bar for a refill, which he gallantly did fetch. But he balked at the dance floor, ruining what was left of his chances with her. 

The music was, predictably, great, and there were bubble machines and smoke machines but, better still, the dance floor was the one place Elisabeth could be certain not to bump into Mike. Charlotte and Colin were already busy gyrating under the disco mirror balls and soon she was doing the same with one of Colin’s smooth-moving and, seen through Champagne goggles, already not quite so ugly-looking cousins.

Then towards the end of “Rock the Casbah” she felt brutally thirsty and headed for the bar, having checked first of all that Mike’s bacofoil bow-tie was nowhere in sight. She ordered a pint of cranberry and soda, which the gentleman behind the bar handed over in no time, and without even asking her to repeat her order first. My god, Charlotte, you really are good, Elisabeth thought to herself as she turned back, sipping her drink. 

‘Elisabeth!’ said Caroline, and almost crashed into her. 

‘Elisabeth,’ said Mike.

‘Mike, Caroline, Rachel,’ Elisabeth replied, surprised at how normal she managed to sound. Mike stood to the right, an arm wrapped proprietorially around little Rachel’s shoulders and a smug smile on his face. Rachel was in the middle, looking a bit startled, but otherwise petite and cute with her big brown doe eyes. And Caroline was to the left, almost as small as Rachel, but beautiful rather than cute, despite having made no effort whatsoever for Charlotte’s sake, and wearing the same spaghetti strap sequin top and skinny jeans combo she wore to every party, because how could she go shopping while there was a war going on in... 

‘It’s nice to...’ Rachel started.

‘God, Elisabeth, it’s _sssso_ good to see you!’ Caroline interrupted, an almost bowled her over. 

Elisabeth’s experience was that Mike’s sister was at least as strong as she was small, but that she usually preferred cold-shouldering to more physical forms of aggression. What knocked her back for six, therefore, was the fact that Caroline was smiling away at her for the first time in... well, ever. And now taking an unprecedented amount of interest in her welfare too:

‘How are you doing? It’s been ages! We’ve missed you, you know, and I’m not just talking about Mike!’

Caroline? Miss her, Elisabeth Bennet? Highly unlikely. Elisabeth frowned and her eyes moved from Caroline’s face to Rachel’s. Understandably, after Caroline’s performance she was looking up at her boyfriend for reassurance. He gave her a fatherly smile and squeezed her shoulder, and then the penny dropped: of course, what better way for Caroline to wind up her brother’s new girlfriend, than to chummy up to the old one! Elisabeth was wondering how she could possibly get herself out of this situation without further inflaming it when Mike finally did the gentlemanly thing and stepped in:

‘So how’s things with Tom then?’

Oh, that was low. 

Very low, even for him. 

Because judging by the self-satisfied look on his face he knew exactly what he was doing. The opening of his best man speech had probably not been innocent either then. How pathetic: he should take a page from the traders’ book and learn at the very least not to gloat so very obviously.

‘Things with Tom are just the way I like them, Mike, thank you for asking,’ she said, then tried to step away and back to the dance floor and to Colin’s fun-ugly cousin.

‘No, come on, have a drink with us!’ Caroline protested, and stuck her arm out before Elisabeth could sidestep her, meanwhile shouting to the barman: ‘Champagne, three!’

‘Right, Caroline, well I’d better...’ Elisabeth mumbled. But Caroline proceeded to bar Elisabeth’s way with one arm, whilst with the other she grabbed the first flute off the barman and gave it to Mike. She then gave the second to Elisabeth and kept the third for herself. 

After a few seconds of frowning down at her two drinks, then at Rachel standing empty handed less than a yard away, Elisabeth realised there must be a mistake and held the flute out to her. But Caroline raised her own glass in the way before Elisabeth could make contact with Rachel’s hand, and the two glasses clinked with a crystalline ring:

‘To Charlotte and Colin: good times!’ Caroline cried, raised her flute again with a huge grin, and then knocked it back in a couple of hearty gulps. 

With Caroline’s glass thus out of the way, Elisabeth decided to try and hand Rachel the flute once more, but this time it was Rachel who withdrew her olive-skinned hand with a painful little sigh, and turned to her boyfriend with a tremulous voice:

‘Mike?’

‘What, your new girlfriend can’t even get her own drink at a free bar now? Elisabeth used to be a bit more self reliant. Seriously, Rachel, if you can't get yourself a drink here today good luck getting clean drinking water next time you're in Sierra Leone.’

Caroline returned to smiling at Elisabeth. Mike cast an anxious look down at Rachel, then a pleading one at his sister, then an imploring one at the barman, then looked back at Rachel and squeezed her shoulder and then her tiny waist. 

But, as ever, he did not say or do anything. 

What Elisabeth experienced next was the most sickening kind of déjà vu. How many times had Caroline played this simple trick on her: blanking her first, then snapping at her if she dared point it out? It was weird though, experiencing it from the outside. Standing here across from the three of them it was obvious that Caroline’s behaviour was out of order. Yet Elisabeth knew all too well how difficult this point was to get across to her and her brother.

For a start, Caroline’s snipes were always targeted with the utmost precision, and rarely uttered in front of a wide audience. Also, Caroline knew how to be extremely pleasant to those she aimed to please, as she was now trying to do with Elisabeth. Most people, therefore, Charlotte included, had never fully understood what Elisabeth could have against her. Plus of course by now little Rachel would have had so much of the award-winning puppy spiel, she'd never even have thought to question the fact that Caroline had not, actually, ever set foot in Sierra Leone. 

To her credit, the new girl was handling herself admirably. By this stage Elisabeth herself would long have lost the plot. But then, as Mike loved to point out, Elisabeth could be so “stubborn” and so “unkind”. Meanwhile he was still busy giving Rachel a hangdog look worthy of the late Diana-princess-of-Wales. 

Elisabeth knew that look well, it was the “oh woe is me, I love you both so much why can’t you just get on, my life is so unfair” look and by god, it made her blood boil to see it work on Rachel as it once had on her. For Mike genuinely treated Caroline’s relational issues with his girlfriends as what his fellow economists termed an “externality” or, in layman’s terms, nothing to do with him. Oh no, he was the victim in all this. 

Elisabeth turned around, set what should have been Rachel's champagne flute back onto the bar, then put down her cranberry-soda next to it and turned back around again, and started to speak in the slow, clear and florid tones they used on the desk on a bad day:

‘Mike for goodness’ sake, grow a pair, will you? Give Rachel here your glass, and tell _her_ to piss off,’ she said, still looking straight at him but thumbing at Caroline. Then she had an even better idea:

‘Caroline: do them a favour, no, do us all a favour, and piss back off to the jungle, since you're so good at extreme drinks-ordering. Piss back off to Sierra Leone and give us all a break, will you?’ 

To Mike she added:

'There, Mike, that's how you do it,’ and walked off. 

God, why had no one ever told her that being a bitch could feel this good? Seriously, in 28 years?

She headed back to the dance floor, bedazzled, her shoulders shimmying and her right foot already tapping the beat to Fatboy Slim’s “Praise you”. Colin’s groovy cousin was dancing a few yards away, and looking back down from the gigantic disco balls on the ceiling she saw him wave at her with great enthusiasm and frowned: why was he looking all fat and ugly, all of a sudden? Oh that’s right: Elisabeth had sobered up, her inner bitch was back in the doghouse where she belonged, and neither Elisabeth nor the bitch felt like dancing anymore. She waved back at Colin’s cousin with a feeble smile, then turned around and went to bid good night to the bride and groom. Frederic intercepted her on her way back from the cloakroom and said something about meeting up again. She treated him to her brightest smile and to Mike’s phone number. Let the two of them work that one out between them.

Naturally Charlotte had made sure that there was a line of cabs waiting for her guests in front of the doors, but before she stepped into one Elisabeth took a good look at the night sky above her glasses and thanked her lucky star, wherever it was behind that thick layer of winter clouds. Being single had never felt so good. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> copyright 2021 Mel Liffragh, all rights reserved.


	19. Home Truths

The next day Elisabeth took the pink dress and matching jacket to the first of the Holloway Road’s many charity shops. She cleaned her room, and spent the rest of the morning wondering how she could ever make it up to Charlotte for starting an altercation on her wedding day. The first stage was to call and apologise, of course. To apologise by text would be too much of a cop out, but then she didn’t want to call and wake up the bride on her first day of married life. Equally she didn’t want to miss her before she boarded that plane to Zanzibar, so in the end she picked up the phone at twelve sharp:

‘Mrs Williams, you up? Is now a good time?’

‘Elisabeth! Of course it is! How are you?’

‘I’m fine, look, I’m just... I’m really sorry about the whole thing with Caroline yesterday. I was out of order and I shouldn’t have... I don’t know what possessed me, but I’ll take you out for lunch as soon as you’re back, somewhere proper and fancy for once, and I’ll try and make it up to you, I promise.’

Elisabeth stopped when she heard Charlotte burst out laughing on the other end of the line.

‘What?’

‘Don’t apologise, Elisabeth. Mike told us all about it and I’m glad you did that. Shame only you left early, you shouldn’t have, Caroline had it coming.’

‘What?’

‘That cow!’

‘Well I’m.... I’m glad you’re coming around to my way of thinking but can I ask what’s brought this about?’

‘She broke my aunt’s hip in the bathroom and then she had the cheek to have a go at her!’

‘She did what?’

‘She barged into the ladies’ room ten minutes after you left. There was a bit of a line and apparently the floor was wet because of the snow... anyhow, the door knocked my poor aunty Pam over and she fell and broke her hip.’

‘Oh dear, I’m so sorry! How is she?’

‘She had to leave in an ambulance for an emergency hip replacement, thank you Caroline. But that’s not the worst part. Aunty Pat was standing next to Aunty Pam and she started, well according to Caroline she started lecturing her but I’m sure she probably just called her young lady and asked her to apologise or something, anyway: Caroline called them a pair of sad old fat reactionary trouts!’

‘Oh dear, I’m so sorry.’

‘And then she wouldn’t back down! She left in huff calling my wedding a pile of pretentious crap!’

‘No!’

‘Let me tell you what’s a pile of pretentious crap. Her bloody Oxfam goats wedding present, that’s what’s pretentious and crap! What on earth is wrong with Selfridges vouchers?’

‘Nothing, Charlotte, nothing. Oh dear, I’m so sorry. Your wedding was great, I wish I’d stayed. I’m so sorry, she was probably just still pissed off with me.’

‘Well that’s neither here nor there, Elisabeth. No one talks to my aunties like that! Especially not after breaking their hip.’

‘I know, and they’re so sweet, the two of them.’

‘I’m still waiting for an apology from her, as you can imagine!’

‘Hey, I’m still waiting for over five years’ worth of apologies so I wouldn’t hold your breath.’

‘Don’t worry I’m not really, it was a figure of speech.’

‘But look, whatever she did, I’m really sorry. Your wedding was great and weddings are not the place for score settling so I’m sorry I had a go at her.’

‘Don’t worry, Elisabeth, we’re cool. Really.’ 

‘Thanks. But please let me buy you lunch when you’re back anyway. What time are you off?’

‘Next weekend.’

‘What?’

‘Have you had a look outside?’

‘Well, I know it’s a bit snowy but...’

‘There’s precisely two inches down South so Gatwick’s gone completely out of action.’

‘That’s ridiculous!’

‘It is, but the travel agent called and suggested rather than go and wait at the airport we just rebook the whole thing and we thought let’s do that.’

‘You must be gutted.’

‘Not at all! We went to see Aunty Pam in hospital, and now we’ll have some lunch, unwrap the presents and go sledging. And now you can take me out to lunch this week so what’s not to like?’

‘You’re right! Well good, enjoy then, I’d better go. Thanks again, Charlie, and congratulations.’

Elisabeth went back to bed and caught up on the sleep she’d missed the previous night, ahead of what she knew would be a hellish week. Raj’s idea was to put a live trade through tradePad on Thursday, even though she’d tried to explain to him that there was far too much left to do between now and then. She already felt exhausted by Tuesday afternoon, when she heard Will’s voice to her left:

‘Elisabeth, you got a minute?’

‘Hmm, not really, why?’

‘Something’s gone wrong here, can you have a quick look?’

‘It never ends up being a quick look,’ she pointed out, her eyes still on the interminable piece of code she was combing through, and heard Will stifle a sigh. A second later she realised that if she could hear him stifle a sigh the desk must be unusually quiet, which made her cast an eye to the clock at the bottom of her screen. Quarter to eight? Surely not. She looked up at the ticker tape: yep, quarter to eight alright. To her right and on the other side of the screens everyone was gone apart from her. 

And Will:

‘OK, can you come and have however long a look you’d like but please do it now?’

She turned to look at him: he wasn’t in full Kingsley-Darcy-death-stare mode, which was good, but he didn’t look happy either, and she’d learnt to prefer him being amused at her expense, than not at all. His top button was undone and his tie loose. He’d never done that before so she wondered at first whether that was good or bad, and then she concluded that it was just distracting. It made her want to stare in between the ends of his shirt collar, but she’d put up with enough IT guys talking to her chest to realise that Will probably did not want her to address her conversation to his Adam’s apple. 

‘Well, since you do ask so nicely,’ she said, wheeling her chair his way. ‘Let’s see, what have you done?’

‘I haven’t done anything.’

‘Well, if it’s not you then it’ll be Market Data,’ she said, and got stuck in. 

He crossed his arms in front of him and sat back in his chair with a frown. She didn’t like it, but it beat that look Andy and Yoda gave her every time the spreadsheet played up on them: that anguished “Doctor, what’s happening, do you think he’ll live?” stare. 

As she’d expected it wasn’t just a quick look, and as she’d expected it was Market Data wasting her time. She typed, she tutted, she tucked her hair back, she control-tabbed impatiently to flick back and forth between Pimms, Excel and Reuters, and in the end she sorted it out:

‘Off you go,’ she said, unaware of how loudly she’d just sighed, or indeed of how many times she’d sighed loudly while working at Will’s PC. She pushed off the edge of his desk to roll her chair back to her own workstation and tried to remember where she’d been before he’d interrupted her.

‘Thank you, Elisabeth.’

‘That’s right, piss off,’ she said while squinting at line 546 for a possible missing semi-colon. 

‘Excuse me?’ 

She should have heard him, he was speaking loud and clear, only she had not been focusing on him because Paul hadn’t indented his code very well, and she was trying to work out which of the four nested “ifs” the “else” on line 548 referred to. 

‘Right, Elisabeth, enough now. What the hell’s your problem?’

OK now that, that was the death-stare. To the power of ten. Plus crossed arms. Equals trouble. She remembered as if in a dream that she might just have told him to piss off, she wasn’t sure why. He’d probably sounded a bit annoyed with her even as he’d thanked her, and she’d definitely been very annoyed at a whole bunch of people at the time. Back in Research, her old colleagues would never have questioned it after eight straight hours of debugging, let alone twelve and a half. She couldn’t expect Will to know that, but she also didn’t have time for an argument with him right now, because although she'd already found three bugs in Paul's code today, there clearly were still more of them out there. 

‘OK sorry, don’t piss off, I didn’t mean that. Mind if we get back to it?’

This failed to unclench Will’s jaw, or indeed his elbows. 

‘I do mind, actually. You gonna tell me what your problem is?’

‘Well, I thought that’d be rather obvious: it’s gone eight o’clock and I’m still here debugging.’

‘Go home then! But for pity’s sake cheer up, Elisabeth. Please.’

‘What?’

‘Cheer up, please, it might never happen.’

‘Right,’

Suddenly she forgot all about not having time for an argument. She attempted to take a deep breath, but anger was tightening her fists and the back of her neck, her entire body felt like a rigid, unyielding mass of uncontainable irritation, and her lungs refused to swell:

‘OK, Will, let me tell you what might never happen, at this rate: tradePad might never happen. Not this Thursday, certainly. Paul’s written us this settlement program here, which randomly loses between five and twelve trades per broker, which I’m pretty sure isn’t part of the original spec. I’ll tell you what might very well happen though: Pointless Poynton’s gonna lump us with a full internal audit unless we re-file our blooming User Testing Documentation for the umpteenth time, before we go live. Oh, and Raj’s just emailed to give me precisely a week’s notice to produce a full report on a year’s worth of UK and European cost numbers, but I guess there’s no way that’s gonna happen either. So you know what, Will, if I forgot to smile sweetly while fixing Market Data’s umpteenth cock up instead of dealing with any of that then I’m terribly sorry and you have my most sincere apologies. Will that do?’

He waited until he was sure her tirade was over, then smiled what she thought might be a sympathetic smile. Perhaps it was the top button thing, perhaps it was the memory of his unexpected kindness at the Christmas party. Or perhaps it was that she’d finally had a good rant so she felt a fraction less frustrated, but she looked at his face and for a second believed that he might mean well. 

Until he opened his mouth: 

‘Smile sweetly, you? That’d be the day.’

Past the initial shock she felt herself tense up all over again. This time a good part of her anger was directed at herself: how could she have been so stupid as to expect sympathy from Fitzwilliam Kingsley-Darcy? Would she never learn? Sympathy was just too far beyond the reach of his stunted emotional capacities. Clearly she was still the bane of his life. 

Because she didn’t smile enough. 

‘Look who’s talking,’ she spat back, in a tone grating even to her own ears. ‘Because of course you smile sweetly all the time, don’t you? I tell you what, why don’t I just get back to Paul’s code, if I’m such a pain in the backside?’

‘I never said you were a pain in the backside.’

‘You’re right: you probably meant a pain in the arse.’

‘Jesus, Elisabeth, what’s wrong with you!’

At long last he was beginning to sound about half as worked up as she felt. Most people found him terrifying, even when he wasn’t actually angry, but now that he was Elisabeth, far from being scared, felt almost gratified to know that she had roused him, finally. Got under that stupid rhino hide of his. 

‘Me? Hey, don’t think there’s anything wrong with me _,_ Will. Nothing I can’t handle,’ she replied with a cold smile, and a self-righteous right index finger on her sternum. She was beginning to think she may be on a rare winner when Will re-crossed his arms and started again in a cold, deliberate voice:

‘Then do us a favour, will you? Quit snapping at everyone, whining at everything and starving yourself. Go on, give it a go. Because if you think that’s gonna bring that idiot back then let me tell you: it won’t.’

She uncrossed her arms to get hold of the desk’s edge and turned back to her screens. It was late, this bloody program was still not working, she was knackered, her left temple was pounding, her neck was rigid with stress about the bug the audit and the yearly stats, and this was the last thing she needed. She’d never asked Will to like her but to bring Tom into it, it was just... low. And surprisingly painful, still. Coming from anyone else she would have discounted it as a word too far, a slip of the tongue, but not from him, oh no: 

‘What was that supposed to mean?’ she asked slowly. She’d turned back to him with her best attempt at the Kingsley-Darcy death-stare, but she was in fact clutching at the edge of her desk with something much closer to desperation.

‘Have a guess, I think you can work it out.’

‘You have no right to bring Tom into this,’ she said, feeling her voice beginning to quiver.

‘If you don’t want me to bring him into this then quit beating yourself up over some foreign-dwelling idiot who’s not worth the...’

‘Will, butt out!’ 

She was shouting now, but it was either that or starting to blub, and she wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction.

‘Fine,’ he tried to say, but she was off:

‘Just butt out, OK? Tom is none of your business, is that clear? And yes, perhaps I will stop beating myself up, yes, the day you stop being such a cold, mean, arrogant, emotionless...’

‘You were right before: perhaps we should just get back to work.’

His poker face had just registered something like surprise, possibly even pain. It was some satisfaction, but not enough to make up for the fact that she’d lost it. Arguing with him was one thing, a pretty common thing in fact, but it had never got personal before. To shout at him, or at anyone for that matter, was just not on. It was undignified, unprofessional, it was beneath her and she now felt like a complete idiot – yet again. 

She turned back to her screens, and him to his. But she knew there was no way she’d find that bug now. Debugging requires clear, cool and unemotional thinking, and right now she wouldn’t have trusted herself to add 2 and 2 without screwing it up. Plus, according to Will, the bug in Paul’s program wasn’t a problem anyway, despite the go-live date less than three days away. So she decided she might as well head home. Shame the pool would be closed by the time she got there.

‘Try and have a good night, Elisabeth,’ she heard after she’d passed his desk. She stopped and turned to look back at him from the doors to the atrium, fully expecting him to be spoiling for a fight again, but no. He just sat there watching her from his seat with his arms crossed and his tie loose and his top button undone. She couldn’t decide whether he looked hurt, or just disappointed, but she knew for sure that she wanted the building to collapse down and swallow her:

‘I’m really sorry, I’m just knackered, I didn’t mean...’ she started, one hand in her hair.

‘Don’t beat yourself up about that either, OK? It’s fine, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you.’

‘You didn’t upset me.’ 

She let her hand fall back down and they stared on at each other in silence.

‘Good night,’ he said after a while, but rather than go back to his spreadsheet he carried on looking at her after he finished, so she wasn’t sure what to do:

‘Don’t work too late,’ she said, and left.

‘Owwwwww, Charlie, what have I done now!’

It wasn’t so much a question as a long moan, uttered on her mobile phone as soon as she was out of the building and shivering on her way to the bus stop. 

‘Elisabeth? What’s up, darling? What’s Tom done now?’ Charlotte asked - a fair assumption given the general drift of their conversations since the New Year. 

‘It’s not Tom, it’s me. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but I think I just went off on one again and called Will a tosser.’

‘I know, he is a bit of a tosser, isn’t he?’

‘To his face, Charlie! I think I called him a cold, mean, emotionless, arrogant... he stopped me before I could finish and call him a bastard or a git. Or worse, I’m not quite sure where I was going with it.’

Charlotte let out a peal of the purest laughter. 

‘Oh, Elisabeth, my dear, dear Elisabeth! You are priceless, well done you! Someone had to tell him!’ she said, and started giggling again. 

It was hard not to go along when Charlotte was having one of her legendary laughing fits, so Elisabeth surprised herself by letting out a couple of half-hearted half-chortles, soon followed by a deep sigh.

‘OK, right, sorry about that,’ said Charlotte, still panting a little, ‘Not funny of course. But I am proud of you, you know!’

‘Thanks.’

‘Complete career suicide of course. What happened?’

‘I don’t know, I had to help him with a spreadsheet. Bloody market data team’s cock up, as usual. And then you know how I can get a bit shirty when I’m debugging... I mean no shirtier than they all get on a daily basis of course, but then he dragged Tom into it and I don’t know, I just lost it.’

‘Well, understandably! What on earth does Tom have to do with your spreadsheets?’

‘Apparently I’ve got to stop feeling sorry for myself because it’s no fun for them, you see, poor traders,’ Elisabeth explained with another sigh. This time she heard herself do it, because Charlotte remained uncharacteristically silent on the other end of the line. 

‘Charlie, you there?’ Elisabeth asked, and checked the signal on her phone.

‘Aha, yes,’ Charlotte said, but her voice was a bit faint.

‘Oh good, thought I’d lost you for a sec. Must be a bad line.’

‘No no.’

‘What is it?’

‘I’m really sorry, darling, but...’ Elisabeth heard Charlotte take a deep breath and when she spoke again she got it over with as quickly as she could: ‘I kinda think he might have a point. Maybe.’

‘What?’

‘Look, I’m sorry. I know it’s been real tough for you, honey, but he’s got a point, you know. Tom’s the tosser in all this. You know that. Everyone can see that, yet for some reason you beat yourself up about it as if it’d been your fault. It wasn’t!’

‘But, it was. I knew he wasn’t relationship material, I knew it and I decided to ignore it because I’m vain and a silly little flirt.’

‘Oh, Elisabeth, stop it now. Just stop it!’

‘You know I’m right though.’

‘OK, fine! Let’s say you were monumentally stupid and it is all your fault. How is moping and starving yourself and blowing up at people going to help?’

‘I’m sorry!’

‘Stop being sorry, that’s the whole point! We all make mistakes, you know. I do too, everyone does! At least it sounds like your mistake was fun at the time.’

Elisabeth thought about this, and about the countless times the guys at work had done terrible trades, been ribbed about it, and just kept calm and carried on, as per the red WWII poster. Seen in a trading context it was pretty obvious: self-pity only makes a bad call worse. 

‘You know what, it wasn’t even that much fun at the time,’ she said, thinking of Mac’s party.

‘I’m sorry, Elisabeth. I really hope you don’t take this the wrong way. Of course I understand you feeling rotten. Of course I do. Will doesn’t know about Jane or half of the rest of the crap you’re putting up with at the moment, but you’ve just not been you, you know. All you do is work and swim, you never have any fun and then you have a go at people. I mean both Will now, and Caroline at my wedding, they fully deserved it, don’t get me wrong. But you hardly ever even smile anymore. I know it’s hard but I miss the old you, Elisabeth!’

‘Me too... well, I’m smiling now.’

‘Oh good!’

‘You’re the best, Charlie, you know that?’

‘Thanks. D’you think you can keep it up?’

‘Smiling? I’ll try. At least with you I know I will.’

‘How about with Will though? How did you leave it?’

‘Oh, all very British, you’d have been proud. I apologised of course, then he apologised for upsetting me, so I pretended not to be upset, all fine and dandy,’ she said, but her mind went back to that long look he’d given her before she’d left, and the memory erased what was left of her smile.

‘Good, I mean as long as appearances are kept up, who gives a monkey’s what he thinks of you, you hate his guts anyway.’

‘It’s not even that easy hating him these days, Charlie, that’s the problem.’

‘Eh?! Sorry, hon: which part of calling him a tosser didn’t come naturally to you?’

‘OK, first of all I didn’t call him a tosser.’

‘But you would have.’

‘And second of all he’s been really gracious covering my back over Paul’s coke photo thing since the New Year. He brings me coffee, he uses the word please in context, he’s completely stopped Lizzie-ing me, and as you’ve just pointed out he’s actually dishing out pertinent life advice, in his own sweet way.’

‘What?’

‘It’s not the first time either, you know, he was right about Toad too,’ she said, frowning to herself.

‘That’s true.’

‘He just doesn’t add up.’

‘He doesn’t add up?’

‘No. He doesn’t. I find that frustrating.’ 

‘Of course you do, darling, you do like your adding up,’ Charlotte said teasingly.

Another frustrating thing had just flashed through Elisabeth’s mind, which she shooed away because Will’s top shirt button had nothing to do with any of this and besides, it would be done safely back up again in the morning. 

‘Exactly,’ she said. 

‘But you reckon you can carry on with the British thing in the morning?’

‘Oh yeah, we’ll be fine, God, he’s good at this, no cross that, he’s great at it. I’ll just play along, it’ll be fine.’

‘Good. Are you gonna cheer up a fraction then?’

‘Just for you, maybe. I’m sorry, I can’t believe I’m spoiling your first week of married life with this tosh.’

‘Don’t worry Elisabeth. Don’t worry about any of it, OK?’

‘OK I’ll try. Love to Colin, bye.’

‘Bye, love you!’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> copyright 2021 Mel Liffragh, all rights reserved.


	20. Go Live

Charlotte was right: Elisabeth had to stop feeling sorry for all her past idiocies, and try to move on as gracefully as possible. She started by getting in extra early the next day, and with a clear head, some peace and quiet and a bit of method she found Paul’s last bug after only twenty minutes, just as Will was walking in with the morning coffees. Great, if he was still buying her macchiatos then things were probably cool, so she took ten seconds to save her changes before she looked up and acknowledged him. 

‘Morning, Will! Thanks!’

‘Good morning, Elisabeth.’

Oh dear. 

People were scared of his death-stare but this was way, way worse: he was giving her his corporate smile. The one he’d used on Toad during his job interview. The one she’d seen him flash at countless idiots since, whenever he knew better than to argue with one. Being idiots, the countless idiots usually bought it and just smiled back at him, but Elisabeth was no idiot. She had, admittedly, been a right old idiot yesterday, but she had since made a promise to Charlotte. So instead of fiddling with her hair and mumbling another pointless apology she forced on a smile and spoke loud and clear:

‘Good news: I found the bug!’

Her smile wasn’t nearly as polished as his, and she didn’t kid herself that he wouldn’t see right through her and realise that she felt awkward as hell. But it showed willing, which was the whole point.

‘Great! So we’re back on track for Thursday?’ he asked, still with the same unbearable grin. Already she was struggling to keep smiling back at him, but smile on she did, as best she could. 

‘With tradePad we should be, yes,’ she said, turned back to her screen and let her face relax.

‘Great,’ he said again. 

She didn’t check his face. She’d rather not know.

Instead she worked hard again all day, and since Neil was going to be her guinea pig tomorrow she mostly spoke to him, to the test brokers and to Paul. Which was just as well because on the rare occasions she had to appraise or consult Will he either gave her the horrible fake smile, or that dejected look from after their fight, the too-fed-up-to-bother-even-getting-angry one. She smiled on, of course, though probably not sweetly enough. She and Paul stayed late again that night, talking to New York and making sure they were ready for all eventualities.

Then came the fateful day. 

Elisabeth made a conscious decision to carry on with her t-cost report for Raj and let Paul handle the live trade with Neil. He was going to be the first line of support going forward and she wanted the guys to trust him. But she kept an eye on him and Neil all day, thinking what a fantastic parody it would have made of that scene in _2001: A Space Odyssey_ where the apes find the monolith. 

First came fear and anger. Why wasn’t it opening? Oh hang on, it was doing something now but where had Neil’s emails gone? Where were they? They used to be right here! Paul brought back Neil’s Outlook window from behind tradePad’s, and asked him how he would prefer to have things arranged across this three screens. First disaster averted: they’d demonstrated that opening tradePad did not result in loss of emails. Excellent.

Anger gave way to mistrust. What? A login screen? But he’d logged into Pimms already! Different software – did Neil really want a trading platform that the cleaner could get into? Oh good point. Neil gingerly entered his new log in.

Then came the cautious prodding stage, and a barrage of questions. What did this button do? That one? This icon? Hang on, but what if I press it twice instead of once, by mistake? It’ll never work, see, it doesn’t work, I just pressed it and nothing happened. That’s because you haven’t loaded any orders. Oh, I have to load in orders? Yes, why don’t we try it? They pressed the button with “Load order” written on it, and they tried just two: a buy of Vodafone and a crossover trade, a sell and a short sell, in Man Group. 

The prodding now became more eager and more confident. Oh, so this is how I can send an order to the market. Nifty. Oh look, that price just moved! Yes, it’s real time. Are you really sure nothing bad’s going to happen if I press this button and send the bid? Nothing, go ahead. Really, sure? Go ahead, you can pull it back later if you want. The recoil of Neil’s shoulder after he clicked on the “Place order” button would have made you think he’d just fired a Kalashnikov. 

And then nothing bad happened. 

The number of shares left for him to buy on the main page had gone down by the amount he’d just placed, and Neil calmed down. He stopped prodding and started exploring properly, all by himself. He sliced what was left of his two orders into about thirty clips, and had great fun placing them high and low on the two stocks’ respective order books. Normally he would have dealt these two stocks in a couple of tranches maximum, but today was a quiet day and Andy had been given all his other trades to deal, so Neil could focus. The rest of the trading team, which had so far stayed well out of it, started gathering behind Neil’s chair and asking to “have a go” too. 

Then came the mystical sunrise moment, when Neil’s first bid was hit and the first tranche of the Vodafone order appeared in the “Executed” column of the main screen. 

…And there was much rejoicing throughout the desk. 

Not from Elisabeth though and not, by the look of it, from Will either. She would not relax until she knew that Neil’s however many clips of Vodafone and Man Group were accounted for safely both in Pimm’s, and at the broker’s, and until the back-office guys confirmed that everything matched. The pretty windows flashing numbers on Neil’s screen were but the tip of the iceberg: Paul and Elisabeth had spent hours automating the upload of executed trades back into Pimms, and automating an email of the same information back to each broker they’d dealt with. This was the very piece of code, which until yesterday randomly lost trades. She could only hope that it wouldn’t now randomly start losing zeros. 

The wait was agonising. Five minutes after they’d shut tradePad down for the day the back-office guys said the broker still hadn’t received the trade confirmations. How could that be? Paul tracked the email down to the point where it had left the bank’s servers, precisely 37 seconds after tradePad had shut down. After that there was no telling where the info had gone, if not to the broker. Neil grew nervous again and Will started talking about re-sending the confirmations, manually, from Pimms. 

Fuming, Elisabeth almost told him to piss off again, but managed to ask him for an extra ten minutes instead, in a nervous but polite way. He crossed his arms and gave her five, together with his worst death-stare. She was immensely grateful for both. 

Four minutes passed, three more phonecalls were made by the back-office to the broker, to no avail. Neil had already started copying and pasting from Pimms into an email, ready to bypass weeks’ worth of late night and early morning programming by both Paul and Elisabeth. This was infuriating. All the complicated parts of the process had gone fine, and now they were going to fail over a stupid email. Jesus, even Mike could do emails...

‘Wait, Neil! You too Will! Just wait!’ she cried, pointing a bossy index finger at each. She stood up and walked across the aisle on Neil’s side and to the back-office desk. 

‘Put them on the line again,’ she said.

‘We’ve only just called, they haven’t got anything.’

‘No no, they have, put them on speakerphone.’

Someone did, reluctantly.

‘Hey, have you guys checked your spam folder? Is our email there by any chance?’ Elisabeth asked. 

The yes which came back was timid and barely audible, but the yes which Elisabeth then let out, punching the air, must have been heard all the way to the seventh floor. 

Now there could be much rejoicing throughout the desk. Even Will looked, for once in his life, genuinely happy. In Charlotte’s line of work this would have been a group hug moment, but out here it was just another “go out and get plastered” moment. The only trouble was, today was Thursday, which meant Elisabeth was due to go and visit Jane. But the guys wouldn’t hear of her not joining them. 

She didn’t want to sound like a party pooper, but she also couldn’t contemplate letting Jane down, so she tried to explain to them that she really must see this friend in hospital, without getting drawn into explaining who the friend was. In the end it was agreed that the guys would all go to Borough Market, so that she could join them as soon as she was finished, in one quick hop down the new Jubilee line extension. 

She got to the hospital just as Jane was having her tea: poached salmon, new potatoes and steamed veg. Spotted dick for pudding. Some cheese. Elisabeth realised she might be starting to get over Tom, or tradePad, or both: the smell made her peckish, something she hadn’t felt in ages. Normally she hated feeling peckish, once she started she found it almost impossible to think about anything other than food, but tonight she was just ecstatic to feel her stomach rumble with something other than anxiety.

As for Jane, she was looking and sounding more like the Buddha every week, reclining there with her expanding tummy and her quiet smile. She’d cleared 26 weeks and things were looking great, by which she meant that she could look forward to another two to three months stuck to a drip in this dismal pink room, during which she would be extensively shafted by her employer, which didn’t matter one jot because she’d soon be giving up on a brilliant career to become an earth mother. Elisabeth couldn’t make sense of it, so she gave up on her sister in law’s good sense and appealed to her sense of duty instead:

‘You’ve got to come back, Jane. If you don’t do it for yourself then do it for the sisterhood.’

‘What sisterhood?’

‘Precisely. There’s precious few enough of us out there already, think how long it’ll be before we have another woman MD if you don’t come back.’

‘Oh.’

‘We need you: me, the girls in marketing, legal, even the girls in market data and the back office, we need a role model and right now that’s you. You just can’t leave.’

Jane frowned with typically modest incomprehension, so Elisabeth elucidated: 

‘You know that woman who does the early shift in the back-office? She’s there at six every morning so she can leave at three and pick up her kid from school. No one else ever wants to do her shift, but it’s the only one she can do so according to her boss it’s the bank that’s being really flexible, not her.’

‘That sounds a very good arrangement. Quite a few mums work that way in other teams too, if the dads can do the drop off in the morning.’

‘That’s not the point. The point is she’s knackered but she was saying the other day that at least when she looks at you she sees what she could do.’

‘Me? Why would she even know me?’

‘Everyone does, Jane! All the women anyway. How often do they get to see a mum of two and a half on _Win!,_ announcing portfolio launches and a new nursery voucher scheme?’ 

‘None of that’s gonna make any difference,’ Jane said in the end in a cool, detached tone. Elisabeth recognised her defence mechanism:

‘What do you mean it’s not going to make a difference? Come on, Jane! Weren’t you on the committee that finally got the maternity policy extended to six months? You gave everyone another two months to breastfeed, I think you should take pride!’

‘Clearly you haven’t tried breastfeeding,’ Jane joked, but still with that defensive coldness in her voice.

‘OK I haven’t, no, but if you’ve done it for the twins then it must be the best thing to do, right?’

‘What I mean is that none of this Diversity stuff is going to put any women on the bank’s board,’ Jane said, as if Diversity was a rude word. 

‘OK maybe it won’t put women on the board next year, but in the long run?’

‘No, even in the long run it won’t make a speck of difference, let me tell you. Might even make things even worse,’ Jane insisted.

Which she very rarely did.

‘Well, what would make a difference then?’ Elisabeth asked, sensitive to what must therefore be the exceptional strength of Jane’s feelings on the subject.

‘Quotas,’ Jane said, loud and clear, and drew her lips as she watched Elisabeth’s face decompose.

‘Quotas?! Quotas? Are you mad! What are we? We’re not disabled for goodness’ sake, we’re just women! And since when did you become such a raving leftist anyway?’

‘I’m not a raving leftist, and I wasn’t expecting you to agree,’ Jane said calmly.

‘I’m sorry, Jane, but I really don’t think you’ll find many people to agree with you on that one. Quotas? You’re mad. It’s so bloody... demeaning! I can’t believe you _,_ of all people, are saying that we can’t get there on our own merits.’

‘Not while mothers compete with fathers for those board positions, no. Not until women learn to neglect their children in the way fathers do, everyday. Or until women stop having children altogether. Because until then there won’t be such a thing as a level playing field. Of course if that ever happens it will be a sad day for humankind, but never mind that.’

Elisabeth’s mouth was gaping with disbelief. Jane by contrast was back to her old, sparky self:

‘From where I stand it’s either quotas or the New Man. Remember that guy, last century, who was going to love us without objectifing us, who’d respect us and who’d share all house and child-care duties with us on an equal footing?’

‘You mean the man I thought Mike was, and Vincent will never be?’

‘Precisely: so that leaves quotas.’

‘Never. All this is just talk, anyway. It’s all very well for you to say this to me in here but I bet you’d never repeat it in front of Vincent. Let alone to the Board.’

‘Of course I wouldn’t!’ Jane said, inexplicably cheered up by this conversation, ‘Don’t be silly, Elisabeth, only a man could get away with saying something like that to the Board!’

OK, so Jane wasn’t joking. Or budging. In fact it felt very much like she’d just won the first round. Perhaps Elisabeth shouldn’t have taken the argument to the macro, political level after all. Best perhaps to keep it personal:

‘But come on, Jane, I know it’s always been harder for you than for the old boys but you’ve done such a great job! Can’t you get some more help, I don’t know...’

‘Oh I do know,’ Jane cut in. ‘Fiona Kemp out in New York, she’s an MD, just got her third kid. She came back full time after three weeks, and she explained to me how she does it. She expresses her milk at work and she’s got three nannies: one daytime, live in, one night-time, live out, and one for handover and emergencies. The three of them share 10% of her bonus, so they’re incentivised to support her career. Isn’t that brilliant? She gets plenty of quality time with the kids at the weekend -apparently.’

‘That sounds pretty perfect to me.’

‘Elisabeth, you say that now, but wait until you get your own little bundle of flesh and need. You’ll see: what she described is your brother’s idea of being a parent. That’s my boss’s idea of it. It’s everyone’s idea around here,’ Jane said, forgetting for a moment that she wasn’t at the office, ‘but it’s not mine. I’m sorry but my children are more important to me than the bank’s bottom line. I want to be with them when they’re sick. Personally I don’t think it makes me un-committed, I think it makes me human. But this whole City’s culture is built on putting the company first. It’s not just our bank, and economically I can understand it. But deep down it makes me angry, Elisabeth. It does, but it will never ever change and meanwhile I only get one chance with this one,’ she concluded, patting her belly. There was not a trace of gaiety left in Jane’s voice now as she enumerated: 

‘Banking. Golf. Fishing. Cricket. Men will always come up with occupations more important and even more time consuming than looking after their offspring. The City’s just one of them, and I’m done battling against it.’

The last sentence hit Elisabeth like a punch to the chest. 

Perhaps it was Jane’s sullen resignation, rather than her actual words, but at last Elisabeth begun to understand what had been going on inside her head. All these weeks she’d refused to hear it because it was scary, unthinkable. Ever since the twins had been born she’d looked at Jane as the woman who had it all: a stable marriage -albeit to Vincent-, cute bilingual kids, a brilliant career of her own, money in the bank and a smile on her face. Jane Bennet-Bingley didn’t do complaining, and Elisabeth had foolishly thought that was because she was fine. 

It was too painful to start seeing the cracks in the great feminist ideal, to acknowledge that there just might not be such a thing as a happy working mum. And if Jane couldn’t be happy in a well-paid job that she was great at, then who stood a chance? Not Elisabeth certainly, not with her talent for corporate bumbling. 

Worse than that, Elisabeth realised that all these years she’d failed to see her friend’s struggle. She shouldn’t have bought Jane’s happy front, she should have seen through the brave smiles and the “never minds”. But she’d been too absorbed by her own childish fights with the Old Boys to see those of her friend. She'd been too cowardly to ask questions she wouldn’t like the answer to. And now Jane was here, stuck between four pink walls, and giving up, and Elisabeth felt it was every bit as much her fault, as it was Toad’s, or anybody else’s on the bank’s Board. 

‘How’s things with Tom?’ Jane asked, back to her usual warm, considerate self. Elisabeth stared at her in disbelief. How could Jane care about Tom when... hell, compared to what Jane was going through, her heartbreak over Tom was just self-indulgent piffle. It didn’t feel like it, still, far from it. But it was. 

‘Tom? You know what, I think it’s time I moved on from Tom. Several people have been suggesting it, and I think they’ve got a point.’

‘OK, great! That’s great, I’m glad you’re getting over him.’

‘Who said I was getting over him?’ Elisabeth said, blushing at the thought of her most recent outburst at Will, ‘But I think I should at least try and get over him, if you see what I mean.’

‘That’s great. I guess he must be back with... I mean he hasn’t tried anything on, has he?’

‘Thank goodness no, he hasn’t. I might be stupid enough to fall for it.’

‘You weren’t stupid.’

‘I was. You know I was, I know I was. But _,_ as of now, I’m going to try not hate myself over it. It’s going to be hard because you know how hard it is for me to tolerate stupidity in anyone, let alone in myself, but I guess I’ll have to make an exception. After all if you and Charlotte are still putting up with me...’

‘We never put up with you, Elisabeth, we put you straight,’ Jane said and, to Elisabeth’s immense relief, smiled again. ‘But look, if you’re going to get over Tom shouldn’t you go be hanging out with handsome traders rather than with me?’

Elisabeth frowned. Oh yes, right, she must mean Will. If only she knew. 

‘I guess you’re right, I should,’ Elisabeth replied. 

She’d come to the conclusion on her way over that perhaps she just intrinsically annoyed Will. After all there were plenty of people whom she found annoying, just like that, for no particular reason. In which case there was little she could do other than to try and put up a bright front, as indeed he’d been doing, coffees and phoney smiles and all. She felt her phone vibrate in her back pocket. ‘It’s Neil, they’re going for tapas.’

‘It’s nice of them to check on you. You should go.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘They’ll kick you out of here in a minute anyway,’ Jane said with a dismissive flap of her still delightfully small hand. ‘Off you go! Hurry up and have fun for both of us!’

‘I’ll try my best. See you next week?’

‘I certainly hope I’m not going anywhere,’ she replied pushing her tray and reaching for _Hello!_

‘Fingers crossed!’ she said, gave Jane a kiss, and left to go and catch the Jubilee Line.

She called Neil back as soon as she got a signal, and waited as instructed at the Borough High Street exit with Leo Tolstoy. Pierre was in all likelihood about to go and propose to Natasha, at long last. After 700-odd pages of Pierre's thwarted devotion, Elisabeth had read on obsessively up and down the station’s stairwells and corridors, and still could not put the book away while she waited: 

_“But he had hardly entered the room before an instantaneous feeling of loss of freedom made him aware with his whole being of her presence.”_

That ‘instantaneous feeling of loss of freedom’: yep, that’s what she’d felt whenever Tom had been around, with every email he’d sent. It was indeed a loss of freedom because she only realised now, and with Leo’s help, how completely it had bypassed her rational free will, and hence her famed intellectual faculties. Yet she still felt a remnant of that folly even now as she read, and let out a sigh tinged with both sadness and hope. Love, a hundred years ago in a land far far away. It was a while before she sensed someone standing close to her:

‘Enjoying it?’ Will asked.

She snapped the book shut and, with mixed regret and apprehension, she placed it back in her pocket and looked up. 

‘Complete genius,’ she said with a slow, cautious nod. 

He was no longer giving her the horrible corporate smile, thank goodness. In fact by Kingsley-Darcy standards he even looked chilled. Perhaps he too had been more stressed out about tradePad than she gave him credit for. Whatever the reason though, it felt good to see him like this, and as per her fresh resolutions she decided to play it chirpy too and smiled, and he back, in a more subdued and hence far more convincing fashion than in the morning. 

‘Can I have a look?’ he asked, pointing at the distended Barbour pocket which served as her book bag. ‘Whereabouts are you?’

‘Almost finished, don’t spoil the ending!’ she said, handing the book over.

‘Hate to, but Napoleon loses,’ he said while looking for her last cornered page. ‘You don’t really believe in keeping books neat now, do you?’

‘It’s not just books, I thought you might have noticed by now.’

He made to reply other than to smile again, though she had no idea whether that was at what she’d just said or at what Leo Tolstoy had written over a century ago. She watched him read on, mulling over the mind-blowingly awkward prospect of discussing Pierre’s feelings for Natasha with him. 

‘Amazing stuff,’ he said at last, handing the book back. ‘Hate to tear you away from it, but Tolstoy will still be there in the morning.’

‘Ah but you were absolutely right about the military strategy: fabulous stuff, especially for insomnia,’ she joked. She spoke from bitter experience: some parts of Book Three had been a great help in finding sleep in her new polyester sheets. 

‘Philistine. You didn’t like that?’ 

He seemed dead serious.

‘I got the gist but it went on a bit. Where are we going?’

‘Over there,’ he said pointing across the road. ‘Wanted to catch you first though, we had a call from Raj. He said well done, of course.’

‘Of course,’ she repeated, with a fond thought for Raj, ‘but surely what you mean is he praised our outstanding achievings, at the very least he mentioned thought-leadership and the stakeholders, right?’

‘Something like that, yes,’ Will smiled, ‘And there’s good news. The panel review’s gone through and Neil’s been promoted.’

‘Oh the panel reviews, of course…’

She was very pleased for Neil, naturally, but her first thought had not been for him but for Jane, lying bravely, all alone, in her hospital bed, while the bank gave her promotion to some Tom, Dick or in her case: Nigel.

‘What’s wrong, you OK?’

‘Yes, yes, no, that’s great! Fabulous news!’ she said. 

‘I’ll carry on getting the coffees, if that’s what you’re worried about.’

‘Oh no, you don’t have to.’

‘I know.’

OK, now that was pretty smooth. Just confident enough to gloss over the surprise and awkwardness of her “You don’t have to”, but not over-confident either. There was wriggle-room in there if she cared for it, but why on earth would she? She liked her morning macchiato, and she liked even more that Will seemed to have relaxed again, and to be trying to get them over the awkwardness. She liked him miles better that way. 

‘Well, in that case that’d be very nice, thanks.’

‘Come on let’s go, they’re all waiting for you.’

Everyone at the Tapas Bar was already merry, so her arrival was indeed greeted by a chorus of loud cheers. Then a glass of Rioja was thrust into her hand, so smoky it probably stained her lungs as well as her teeth. 

‘Cheers, Lizzie, what would we do without you?’ Neil asked dramatically, clinking glasses with her. 

‘Have a lot more to eat, that’s what,’ she replied, and started tucking into the olives and patatas bravas. ‘I’m starving. What’s everyone else having?’ 

She hadn’t felt this hungry in a long, long time, and her renewed appetite made everything she tried taste delicious. Neil smiled as he helped himself too. 

‘How was your friend?’

‘Same old, but thanks for asking.’

‘What’s wrong, if I may ask?’

‘She nearly lost a baby over New Year. She’s on bed rest in hospital, potentially for another couple of months.’

‘That sucks, I’m sorry.’ 

Elisabeth shrugged and tucked her hair back. Will had vanished but reappeared to her right and picked a slice of the chorizo:

‘What did he say?’

‘Nothing, why?’

‘Oh just…’ he said mimicking her hand gesture behind his ear.

‘No, that was just my hair, Will.’

But she tucked it back absent-mindedly and in doing so she made him smile again. 

‘Fair enough,’ he said, ‘Food to your liking?’

‘It’s fine.’

‘That’s high praise, coming from you.’ 

‘Very high. She has exacting standards,’ Neil said, and she looked from one to the other and back.

‘I do have the most exacting standards, yes, that’s why I work with you lot, isn’t it? Now do pass that chorizo.’

‘It’s pretty hot,’ Neil warned as he obliged her.

‘Never mind. I’m hungry.’

‘She could do with eating,’ Will agreed. ‘And with cheering up. You know what, she’s not doing badly tonight, we should get her drunk more often.’

‘I’m not drunk!’ she protested, then shook her head as she realised that he was making fun of her -again. 

‘In that case,’ Will reached for a bottle and topped her glass up, then Neil’s, then his, ‘to our first tradePad trades, and to Elisabeth and Paul!’ he toasted.

She clinked glasses with all the guys in turn, drank some more, then felt her shoulders relax for the first time in far too long.

‘That’s better, isn’t it, Lizzie?’ said Neil.

‘It’s “Elisabeth”.’ Will stage murmured to him, all the while keeping his eye on her. 

‘Sorry, you don’t like Lizzie?’ Neil asked. If he was anything like her, he was switching on the comedy Scottish accent to hide his shock. 

‘Nope,’ she said, shaking her head, and tucked her hair back, then took another sip. Neil immediately aped her, although of course there was nothing to tuck back in his case, and they both started to giggle.

‘El-isabeth!’ Neil said. ‘Why didn’t you tell us?’

Just then Dean arrived and saved her from having to answer. She hadn’t seen him since that awful broker do, but they recognised each other with mutual pleasure and greeted each other as they had bid each other goodbye: with a continental kiss on both cheeks.

‘Elisabeth! Good evening, long time no see!’

‘Hang on a minute!’ Neil said, ‘How come he gets special treatment?’

‘Hey, Dean, that’s Neil,’ Will said.

‘Of course, I remember Neil!’ Dean replied, nodding as they shook hands. 

‘Nice to see you again, sir,’ Neil said. ‘But how come Elisabeth’s all nice to you?’

‘Because he is nice to me, Neil,’ she explained slowly, ‘so I am nice back.’

‘You’re too kind,’ Dean said.

‘No, she certainly isn’t,’ countered Will.

‘Not to us,’ Neil agreed.

‘ ‘fraid they’re right. I’m not always very nice to them,’ she said, only pretending to speak to Dean, ‘But you know what, they’re not always very nice to me either: they say a lot of rude things, sometimes they shout them, they cross their arms and glower a lot, sometimes they even send rude emails.’

‘OK,’ said Will with good humour, ‘let’s spoof for the next bottle before she gets me in trouble.’

‘What’s the point?’ Elisabeth asked, ‘I thought this was on Raj?’

‘That is so not the point of spoof!’ Neil corrected her with the utmost seriousness. ‘The point of spoof is, that while you still suck at it, we can enjoy one of the few things you can’t beat us at.’

‘Well put,’ Will agreed, ‘But watch the gloating, Neil. Let’s just spoof for who has to go to the bar. To prove a point.’

‘But you don’t have to: I suck at a whole lot of things. Tennis, diplomacy. Pretty much all ball sports in fact.’

‘Thanks, we might try you at pool later,’ Will said, ‘Get some coins.’

She did, and the four of them put their fists in the middle.

‘You start!’ said Neil.

‘Eight!’ she said confidently.

‘Six.’

‘Seven.’

‘Nine?’ Dean concluded, looking at her quizzically. She got out first, Will last.

‘Thank you so much for letting me win,’ she said to him before he made for the bar. ‘That was very considerate of you.’

‘Gloater. But at least you’ve cheered up.’

‘Well there you go, it wasn’t that hard. Off you go.’

Will smiled and walked to the bar, and Dean turned to her:

‘So how have you been? A good year, so far?’

‘Well, a great year so far, yes – work-wise.’

‘Ah, I see. I’m afraid Will did mention you hadn’t been too happy.’

‘I’m sorry that it shows around the office,’ she hastened to say, ‘I shouldn’t let it, really, they’re all very good to me.’

‘They just take an interest. I don’t think anyone’s complaining,’ Dean hastened to reply.

‘Oh no, believe me he does complain,’ she said, nodding towards the bar, ‘But never mind, I’ll be fine -I think. How about you?’

‘Same as you, really. The new job’s going extremely well.’

‘Oh dear, so is that our new euphemism for being dumped?’

‘Most abjectly.’

‘I’m sorry. Join the club.’ she said holding out her hand, and they shook on it with melancholy smiles. 

‘Are you surprised?’ he asked, with unmistakable sadness in his pale eyes. 

‘Can I be honest? Not really.’

‘I knew it. She was just out of my league, wasn’t she?’

‘Of course not!’ Elisabeth cried. ‘No no no, Dean, you’re out of hers! By a long way.’

‘You are too kind.’

‘I’m not.’

‘She isn’t,’ Will agreed, back from the bar. 

‘Thanks, Will,’ she said without turning.

‘You’re welcome. Top up?’

‘Not for me, thanks. ’you got any water?’

‘Do you want to spoof again? See who’s gonna go and get that?’

‘No thanks, I’d just like to drink some water.’

‘Ta-dah!’ he said, and pulled a clear bottle from behind his back. ‘I knew it: she’s a complete wimp when it comes to alcohol,’ he explained to Dean.

‘Absolument! Fab! Thanks!’ she said grabbing the bottle eagerly.

‘Hear that, Dean?’

‘You should be honoured,’ Dean said with a mock-serious nod. 

‘Oh I am. And just think: what a cheap date!’

‘I like to think of it as a high value rather than cheap, if you don’t mind.’

‘But of course,’ Will said, and went round to top the others up.

‘He does like you, you know,’ Dean said casually when Will’s back was turned, not seeming to care very much whether he could be overheard. She frowned for a second at the blatant absurdity of it, before she remembered that Dean’s only flaw was his excess of diplomacy:

‘Oh it’s OK, Dean, you don’t have to say that. I can see he’s making an effort tonight and that’s great, he doesn’t actually have to like me.’

Dean looked at her for a moment as if there was something he couldn’t work out.

‘Well, I’ll say this much, Elisabeth,’ he said in the end, ‘perhaps you guys are as hard to please as one another after all.’

‘That must be why we both like you!’ she replied, and clinked his glass.

‘You really are too kind.’

‘No, she really isn’t,’ she heard behind her back.

‘Thanks again, Will, and I love you too,’ she replied, shaking her head in mock exasperation, still with her back to him. She couldn’t see what face Will was pulling behind her, but soon Dean raised his eyebrows and started laughing at the two of them.

‘At bloody last!’ Will cried, and she spun round to check why. 

‘At long bloody last! Look, look what you’ve done, Elisabeth, you’ve bloody made him laugh!’ he exclaimed, pointing at Dean with the broadest smile she’d seen on his face in a long time -possibly ever. ‘The sad bastard’s been moping for weeks! Seriously, I’ve not seen him like this since that so-called friend of yours dumped him.’

‘Hey look, I just flatshare with two of her college friends.’

‘Whatever: well done, look! He’s still smiling!’

And yes, Dean was indeed looking happy as he pushed his glasses up his nose. Happy in his shy, almost apologetic way, but happy enough nonetheless to put a smile on Elisabeth’s face, and even on Will’s. 

‘I hate to give you credit, as you well know,’ Elisabeth told him, ‘but I think that was a team effort.’

‘You know, perhaps she really is too kind,’ Will said to Dean, ‘God, I hate it when you two are right.’

‘You’d think he’d be getting used to it by now,’ Dean told Elisabeth, at which she shrugged and tucked her hair back, just to make them smile again. 

God, how could she have let herself forget how good it felt to make people smile? Her chest was lightening up at last and swelling with a little unselfconscious joy. She was no longer making an effort. She didn’t care. Perhaps being tremendous entertainment value wasn’t such a bad thing after all. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> copyright 2021 Mel Liffragh, all rights reserved.


	21. Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait point

It was just as well that tradePad was a success, for on the home-front things took a turn for the stressful. Jane’s mum hurt her back looking after the twins, and since Jane’s older sister had a Christening to attend the next weekend Elisabeth was put on a triple shift. She went over Saturday morning straight after swimming and didn’t get back until six o’clock on Sunday night. It rained the whole time so she couldn’t face getting the twins out of the house, and just made a bucketful of popcorn, plonked them in front of the TV with it, and got on with _War and Peace_. 

Back at the flat she interrupted Tom playing the guitar with Ben, and sure enough, _she had hardly entered the room before an instantaneous feeling of loss of freedom made her aware with her whole being of his presence_. Ha! If Leo could but see the bitter irony of it. How noble it seemed on the page, and how downright ridiculous in real life. Of course she couldn’t expect Ben to dump his best friend overnight just because he had dumped her in the most humiliating fashion, but still. Every time he came around she had to pretend to ignore him, then either retire to her room or head out swimming. She’d dropped a dress size and four minutes off her 1km time as a result but, unlike with front crawl, with Tom things weren’t getting any easier with practice. 

Tonight she heard him before she saw him and felt her chest tighten before she’d even put her key into the door. She remembered her fresh resolutions, took a deep breath and a few seconds to collect herself in the tiny hall, then forced out a gruff but audible hello and made for the safety of her room. She mustn’t let him spoil her evening, she reminded herself. Instead she had a well-deserved bath, thinking the boys would be out by the time either cold or hunger drove her out of the water. But her heart sank when she re-emerged, wearing her old green flannel PJs, and saw they were both still around. 

Thankfully, she had with great foresight taken the last tome of Tolstoy with her against such an eventuality. She leant against the counter next to the hob and opened it the moment she had her pan of water going. Even at this crucial point in the plot, she had to re-read the first paragraph half a dozen times before it began to make sense but she stuck with it, as she’d had to do many times before with, say, the _Journal of the American Society of Quantitative Finance._ She’d only just managed to forget her own heartache and focus on Pierre Bezukhov’s when Ben interrupted her again. 

‘Elisabeth?’

‘Aha?’ she said, careful not to look up. 

‘You haven’t eaten?’

‘No but I’m making dinner,’ she replied from behind her book. 

‘We’re getting curries, do you want one?’

No, what I want is for you two to clear the hell out of here so I can relax, she thought. Applying Charlotte’s perspective on tonight’s situation she was finally beginning to feel angrier with Tom than with herself: why, for a start, was she hiding behind that book when he’d been the one who...?

‘No, thanks, I’ll be all right. You have a good time,’ she said, still hiding, and despaired to think what she’d do when she eventually reached the end of _War and Peace_. The guys meanwhile remained silent, which was weird given how much noise they’d made while she was in the bath, and she set about reading, re-reading and re-re-re-re-re-reading her next paragraph. 

‘Right, I’m off!’ Ben said when she turned her back to them to throw some pasta into the boiling water. 

‘See you!’ she replied while putting the rest of the pack back into the cupboard. She couldn’t wait to have the place back to herself. She heard the door slam shut and turned back around with a sigh of relief. 

Tom was still there, staring straight at her. As usual in his presence, her body started reminding her of his power over her in a thousand oppressive ways: eyes wide, breath short, cheeks burning, hands cold and trembling. 

And yet tonight she found that this whimpering frame of hers was no longer wholly subservient to Tom. There was still within her, as it turned out, one thin thread of rebelliousness that had not been worn quite through. Tom started smiling his old smile at her but she did not yield to the tyrant, she did not smile back, and she even brought herself to break the silence:

‘Tom, what are you still doing here?’ she asked, and almost managed to keep her voice steady. 

‘Looking at you,’ he replied, and smiled more broadly. 

That dangerous spark was back in his eyes. Why oh why oh why was it still doing these things to her? Tonight at least it didn’t just make her knees weak, at long last it also made her angry. Too angry, unfortunately, to come up with anything terribly witty by way of repartee:

‘Right,’ she muttered.

‘D’you reckon we could talk? You know: chat, banter, like we used to? You and me, babe, how about it?’ 

Elisabeth clenched at her book, her heart trying its best to rip her rib-cage open and throw itself at Tom, but her head just about level. She kept her eyes on him and her focus on her good, self-righteous anger. Here was, after all, the very person which Jane, Charlotte and even Will would have agreed was worthy of the full might of her ire: 

‘Right, so what is it you want to talk about, Tom? Sara? How is she doing lately?’ Elisabeth asked, crossed her cold clammy arms in front of her shallow-breathing chest, Tolstoy pressed hard against her heart in lieu of armour, and tilted her head to the right.

‘Elisabeth…’

His cocky smile had vanished, thank goodness, and his tone was almost pleading. 

‘What? You don’t want to talk about her? You used to. What’s wrong with you?’

‘Elisabeth…’

‘So tell me, how is she? Who are you guys being unfaithful to with each other, these days? Apart from me, that is.’

‘Elisabeth, I’m sorry. I’m really sorry,’ Tom said slowly, looking her in the eye, and looking for once in his life like he might mean what he was saying. ‘There: I am. I’m sorry it happened, more sorry than you can imagine.’ 

‘Yes but see, Tom, it didn’t happen; you bloody went and did it!’

‘Will you at least let me tell you what happened?’

‘No, I don’t care, I don’t want to hear it!’

Oh but she did. After over a month she still desperately wanted to hear anything, anything at all that could make New Year’s Day even marginally less of a disaster than it was in her memory. Tom stared on at her. Not quite the angry stare she’d first seen on him back in Oxford, that time, but a pretty scary, penetrating stare. He probably saw right through her, because he disregarded her pretended lack of interest, and told his tale anyway, while she clenched her forearms ever tighter to her ribs. 

‘Look, no one invited Sara, OK? No one expected her to turn up. I’d gone to bed, I was so tired and pissed. And frankly, horny as hell too. I passed out waiting for you to bloody return from your sodding office. According to Mac it was about 5 in the morning when she showed. She talked to him, she was high as a kite. He told her about you and to go away and apparently she just flipped, went ballistic. She does that sometimes, when she’d had too much dope.’

‘Yeah, poor thing.’

‘She came into our room, your room, my old room, totally off her head, looking for me. I was so out of it I thought it was you, but she soon put me right.’ he said, pulling the collar of his t-shirt down to reveal three parallel red streaks still running in an arc from the bottom of his neck and left across his chest, ‘And then she started crying and that always gets me, Elisabeth. It always does.’

‘Oh I see, that’s where I went wrong, is it? Didn’t cry enough?’

‘Elisabeth, don’t be like that! Please! I miss you! I hate her!’

‘Do you?’

‘I do, I hate her. I hate what she does to me, she just messes me up. I want you. She knows I want you. As soon as she knew I wanted you she had to go and mess that up too, and I can’t believe I let her.’

Now at last she could see pain on his face, a pain vaguely reminiscent of her own, and which deflated her anger back into something more like philosophical bitterness. 

‘You know what, Tom: it doesn’t really matter why you guys can’t keep off each other. The material point is, you can’t.’

‘But I don’t want to let her do this! Not this time, do you understand?’

‘But you already have, Tom!’ she shouted again. Then, remembering her new resolutions, she stopped until she’d mustered a modicum of dignity again. ‘Don’t try and make it her fault, OK?’ she said more calmly. ‘It’s too late.’

‘I’m not letting you go.’

‘Oh silly me, Tom, I thought you already had!’ she cried, unable to keep her voice calm any longer. A deep dry sob was rising from her chest, so deep she feared swallowing it back might be the end of her. But no: she survived, and pride in her relative composure helped her carry on. ‘God knows you could have had me, you know,’ she added, watching him stare at the carpet with his head hung down. ‘But no, you enjoyed dancing around me, you enjoyed flirting with me and you enjoyed playing cat and mouse with me, and then at the end of the day you just have to be with her.’

‘I want you,’ he said looking up at her again resolutely: ‘It’s you I want. Not her.’

‘Oh yes, since when?’

‘Since forever, since I met you!’

‘And up until New Year’s Eve? I’m sorry, still don’t buy it,’ she said, her tone resolute but her chest ever tighter, so tight she feared she might stop breathing any minute. 

‘I do, I want you. She messed us up. She’s evil and I’m never seeing her again.’

‘Don’t believe you.’

‘Would it make a difference if you did?’

Elisabeth looked at him. What an awful question: would she love him again if she knew Sara was out of the picture for good? Two awful questions in one, really. Firstly: had she ever stopped fancying him rotten? Clearly not, sadly. She just wasn’t letting herself go with it anymore, something she could do extremely well when she put her mind to it. Secondly: could she ever trust him again? She didn’t like that she even let herself consider that question. 

‘Elisabeth, come away with me. Let’s start over. I’ll take you to meet Dad in Wiltshire. He always hated Sara but he’ll love you - I love you.’

‘You don’t.’

‘I do, Elisabeth. Just tell me what I have to do to prove it, I’ll do it.’

‘Tom, it’s more what you have to not do, and it’s way harder to prove anything that way.’

‘I’ll never see her again, I promise! Believe me I don’t ever want to: she’s evil, toxic, she’s poisonous, I’m never…’

‘No, Tom, actually,’ she said calmly. A strange thought had just occurred to her, one of those thoughts which at first appear completely absurd, but grow to be self-evident the longer you consider them. 

‘What?’

‘No, that’s not at all what you should do. You should see Sara. You should definitely see her.’

‘But…’

For the first time in their acquaintance Tom was speechless. All eagerness vanished from his face, replaced by a look of concentration she’d only ever seen on him when he was playing an instrument, the only activity in this world capable of absorbing the whole of his otherwise disparate attention. 

‘You should go and see her, and you should see her over and over again, until you can see her and not let her mess you up, Tom. That’s what you should do. Get her out of your system. And get out of hers. For everybody’s sake.’ 

She wasn’t bluffing. She knew there was a distinct likelihood that Sara and Tom would never be able to get out of each other’s heads or beds, however hard they tried, however much pain they inflicted on each other in the process, or perhaps even because of it. The image of him smoking all pensive on her windowsill after Mac’s party came back to her, and she knew she’d rather never have him, than have him like that again. 

‘I don’t want to be the one keeping you away from her, Tom. I don’t think I could, for a start. But more to the point it wouldn’t be fair. Not to her, not to you, let alone to me. I don’t want you to stay away from her for me.’

Tom frowned at her, then briefly looked at the floor before looking up again.

‘Elisabeth, are you sure?’

‘Yes. Yes I’m absolutely sure.’

If there was one thing she’d picked up from hanging out with the traders, it was that she was rubbish at bluffing, and should therefore never use an empty threat. So no, she wasn’t bluffing: this idea felt right on several levels. It was methodologically sound, a good empirical test of the exact whereabouts of his affections. More importantly, and like all correctly specified tests, it took the ultimate decision out of her hands: the results would speak for themselves. 

‘You actually want me to go there?’

What a stupid question: of course she didn’t, not really. What she wanted was to collapse into his arms, but she was cruelly aware of the difference between what she wanted, and what was good for her, and refrained from going with the former. Sending him away all but broke her heart all over again, but for once in this almost-relationship she was the one calling the shots and that, at least, felt good. 

‘I do want you to go, Tom. Or rather no, I just think you should, but you’re a free agent. Take as long as you like, and if I’m still around, and it’s meant to be,’

He shook his head.

‘No, I’m not taking that risk. I can’t lose you.’

‘Yeah but Tom, look, I certainly can’t take the other risk either.’

‘I can’t lose you.’

‘If you love me as much as you say you do, then you’ll do it.’

She felt shamefully disingenuous saying this. If she ever had, she no longer believed that he could love her, though she did believe that he wanted her very much, still. And how could she blame him? The same was true of herself. Her heart must have its reasons, which her reason would never ever fathom. But she’d deliberately used the word “love” to leave him no way out. He hung his head down.

‘Bye, Tom. Good luck. I mean that.’

Her pasta had long turned into complete mush on the hob. She dumped it in the bin, went back to her room, and took herself to bed with an empty stomach and a heavy heart.

He probably wouldn’t come back, but that was alright. Either way she’d done the right thing, the only thing to do. And she wasn’t going to sit here pining for him, no. She was going to go out and celebrate with Neil and the guys on Wednesday after the VP promotions came out. Maybe they’d go and play pool again after the drinks, as they’d done last time with Dean - that was good fun. Then she would go and see Jane on Thursday, and next weekend there was the VPs’ off-site and she’d get a break from babysitting duties. She’d keep herself busy, that’s what she would do. 

xxx

The next Friday she left the office early with a very proud and excited Neil. They were lugging matching “Global Trading Team” overnight bags, which Raj had “gifted” to his team for Christmas. This was to be Neil’s first “Annual VP off-site conference”. On the train to Hertfordshire Elisabeth tried to explain to him that there was no point in getting over excited about the hotel because he wouldn’t get a minute to enjoy it, but he’d taken his golf clubs anyway and was talking about making his own way back later on Sunday, so he could fit in a round of the famed 18 hole course surrounding the Dale Hall Hotel, Resort and Spa. 

Once off the train they joined a messy queue for the hotel shuttle from the station and got separated. Elisabeth plonked herself down in the first available seat in the third row, next to a lone character from the legal department, who did not utter a word the whole journey. Neil was luckier, he walked right to the back of the bus and introduced himself to another new VP, a thin and very pretty girl with latte-coloured skin and corkscrew hair. 

As expected Elisabeth’s room was absolutely stunning, despite being one of the worst the hotel had to offer. And as expected she didn’t get a minute to relax in it. But instead of joining the after-dinner drinks on Friday night she made time to enjoy the swimming pool. For exactly twenty five minutes before it closed she had thirty meters of glass mosaic-tiled, ozone-treated bliss all to herself, under a glass roof and a starlit sky. 

It almost made up for having had to sit through that excruciating opening address by Sir Phillip. 

Things were bad enough five years ago, when chairmen went on about people as “key-differentiating assets” in between massive rounds of “downsizing”. But as times and hypocrisy had moved on these days it was all about the “talent”: the bank had a strategic talent agenda for talent acquisition and building a talent community. Seeing as the gold talent had served as a biblical currency unit, perhaps it was apt that the fortunes of banks should now hinge on managing it. 

Already on her third VP retreat, Elisabeth considered herself well versed in corporate bullshit but this year Talent Management, being the new HR, had unexpected treats in store for her. They’d decided to mix it up by imposing a sitting plan for the weekend which forced people from different areas to get to know each other during meals, whether they liked it or not – and mostly they didn’t. To one side Elisabeth had dreary from legal, her laconic bus companion, who turned out to be another Andrew, and to the other a Simon from IT, one of Pointless Poynton’s more punctiliously procedural acolytes, who had made VP the same year as Elisabeth by loudly collating the project management paperwork around the release of PMS version 2.4. He had little time and even less affection for the head of the nascent tradePad team. This year’s newbie at the table was a Jan, pronounced Yan, a lanky, beak-nosed, over-eager fixed income portfolio manager originally from Denmark, and gifted with all the irony that country is famed for. Over the course of two dinners he regaled them with many an unsolicited in-depth analysis of alternative scenarios for the Eurodollar yield curve. 

So yes, by Friday night she’d already earned that night swim. 

Then on Saturday morning they had the predictable “high energy session”, in which teams had to complete “tasks” such as building with sticks and string, jigsaw puzzles, marble runs, and even Elisabeth’s party trick: plug-wiring in marigolds. Nothing, in short, of any relevance to finance, but there was a supposed element of team strategy in the choice of task type. For each new task one team member had to be designated to act as leader, and a further two had to observe and record the leadership behaviour that the task had elicited in a) the leader and b) the rest of the team. True to life at the office, therefore, most of the morning was wasted trying to decide what to attempt and then bickering over who would do what bit of it, rather than actually doing anything. A member of the highly paid consultancy unit who had set this up (for a mere £1,500 a day per consultant, +VAT) would then collect the feedback sheets and provide helpful feedback on the helpfulness of the feedback collected. Kudos to the consultants: even Pointless Poynton’s paper trails rarely got so long over so little. 

In the afternoon they split the teams into eight professionally led focus groups (different expert consultancy, similar billing rate) designed to explore the bank’s key issues/ strengths/challenges in “building a talent community”. Focus groups 1-4 related this fascinating question to the bank’s culture, while focus groups 5-8 explored communication strategies. By six o’clock they’d spent over thirty grand on consultancy fees alone and almost a thousand man-hours, and what they’d established was that the Brits resented the Yanks and had no clue about the Japs and that, while everyone felt entitled to know what everybody else was up to, nobody wanted to read or indeed write about it in the Pravda. Elisabeth eclipsed herself for the pool once more, before she had to sit through another unsolicited lecture by Jan, followed by Sir Phillip’s even duller closing address. 

‘Elisabeth, here you are. You didn’t go swimming again, did you?’

After the day she’d had she was undoubtedly glad to see Will, and yet she couldn’t help frown at him. The guy still didn’t add up. She may not have cared to admit this publicly, but she actually liked him nowadays, about 90% of the time. He’d relaxed a lot since their fight -or the tradePad launch, or both- and it turned out that he could actually be fun, once he got to know you and decided that you were worth the effort. Unfortunately 10% of the time he could still be a complete killjoy and give her the death-stare over the most trivial things, like insisting that they start FIX-testing with Dresdner when Dresdner were nowhere near ready or, in this case, the appropriateness of going swimming when networking was expected. 

‘I might have been swimming, yes, but come on, have you seen the pool here?’

‘No, I haven’t because, Elisabeth, you’ll never get on if you don’t spend a bit of time getting to know your peers.’

‘Oh, Will please, give me a break: you’re beginning to sound like Jane.’ 

Indeed in previous years Jane had been the one to lecture Elisabeth about networking at the off-site, rather than just hanging out with her established friends. 

‘Who’s Jane again?’

‘My sister in law.’

‘Your sister in law?’

‘Aha, seriously, you two can be such squares.’

‘Hang on, you’re not married, so she’d be a Jane Bennet, right?’ he said slowly, and Elisabeth nodded back nervously: she and her big stupid mouth, why did she have to go and say sister in law? Friend! Jane was her friend too, right? Will meanwhile was frowning with concentration, trying to work something out. In Elisabeth’s experience this never took very long, which meant that he was getting uncomfortably close to something she hadn’t planned on sharing with him. Except that she just had: 

‘Perhaps she’d even be a Jane Bennet-Bingley if, say, she worked in Product Development?’ Will said, and Elisabeth found it impossible to carry on looking at him. She took a swig of the insipid but cold champagne a waiter had thrust into her hand a minute earlier, and gave Will the vaguest of nods. 

‘Shit, I’m sorry. So this is who you go and see Thursdays, right?’

Fear gave way to resignation. The cat was out of the bag, and it was her own stupid fault for mentioning Jane in the first place. She nodded at her champagne flute again. 

‘And that’s also what you got all upset about, of course. At the Christmas party, were they talking about the MD promotions?’

If he’d got this far by himself there was no point denying it. She sighed again, and nodded again, without looking up:

‘They were, yes. Toad and her own effing boss. How he didn’t get sacked...’

‘Hey, one out of two ain’t bad, Elisabeth, you guys did good,’ Will said, and she looked back up at him. It was typically well judged of him to smile and crack a joke at this junction. She could use a joke. 

‘I still don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Yeah right,’ he said, then carefully removed the smile from his face before carrying on: ‘Look, I know it happens all over the place and it sucks, but Jane’ll be a shoo-in next year. She’s great and you’re right, she is a fantastic corporate square: everyone likes her.’

Elisabeth’s face fell again, and she stared at Will with a mix of sadness and impotent rage, which baffled even his natural talent for seeing right through her. Next year? If only he knew. She’d tried to reason with Jane several more times since their falling out about quotas, but to no avail. Jane had given up on the City, and Elisabeth knew that the City would be only too quick and too happy to give up on Jane. To hear Will praise her only served to remind Elisabeth of what a waste it was. It made her angry, so angry that Will’s easy confidence faded away, replaced instead by the look of disappointment he’d had after their last bust up. 

She reminded herself that, unlike during their last bust up, tonight he’d done nothing to deserve her ire, so she made a conscious effort to keep it under wraps:

‘Of course, yes, next year,’ she said, only a little stiffly, and forced on a smile. He looked away and started rifling through his pockets. 

‘This will help though, right?’ he said, and produced a big smile and a small cigar. Half an hour earlier she’d almost passed out with frustration as the port and smokes had been whisked in front of her inferior female nose after the cheese course. Before she knew it gratitude came gushing out of her mouth:

‘Thanks so much, Will, you’re a star!’ she cried, reaching for the cigar. 

In a flash he stopped smiling, his hand shot up and he held it just out of her grasp, with the tiniest hint of teasing on his poker face: 

‘Really now? Can I have that in writing?’

She bit her lip, dropped her hand and her gaze, and frowned to herself for moment. What was going on here? Had Fitzwilliam Kingsley-Darcy just pulled her metaphorical pigtails? Surely not. She stole a brief, suspicious glance up at him to check, and got back the cockiest of go-on-then smiles. 

OK, this could only mean two equally scary, equally improbable things; things so incongruous that she would have called them impossible if they hadn’t been happening right before her. The first was that he was trying it on. She knew his face well enough and she was definitely still sober enough to tell. There was an unapologetically flirty spark in this smile which, and this was the second unbelievably scary bit, which instantly made him attractive instead of merely handsome, and made her want to smile wantonly back. 

She stole another glance at his face, her lips already curling up despite her best intentions to the contrary. Oh, what the heck! They were having rubbish champagne at the end of a rubbish day, and surely there was no harm in a little bit of stir-crazy fun. If she knew him it would be over soon enough. 

‘Yes, yes you can, Will, absolutely. You can have it all in writing. Just as soon as we’re live with tradePad for Baluchistan’s derivative market,’ she replied, crossed her arms _à la_ Kingsley-Darcy and held his gaze with hers.

‘I see,’ he said, put his poker face back on and dropped his hand. Her eyes followed the cigar’s course while his lingered on her face. She looked back up at him and found this new searching look in his dark eye even harder to hold than the flirty one from before. 

‘OK, be a good sport now,’ she said, keeping her voice steady, ‘hand it over, it’s of no use to you.’

He didn’t budge, though a small glint in his eye told her he probably felt like smiling.

‘Pretty please?’ she added, grinning and fluttering her eyelids away to try and coax the whole smile out of him. 

‘Is this how we got our tradePad servers?’ he asked, smiling fully as he edged the cigar towards her. Such an easy victory came almost as a disappointment. She would have expected more of a fight out of him, but she quickly uncrossed her arms to make snatch for her cigar: 

‘Pretty much!’ she shrugged. 

But though she had got hold of the cigar this time, Will still hadn’t let go of the other end of it.

‘Can I drive you home tomorrow?’ 

‘Sure!’ she said lightly. 

Or at least she hoped she said it lightly, but she wasn’t at all sure. She looked away and he let go. Together they headed out to the adjoining terrace, which the hotel was keeping at indoor temperature thanks to a series of monstrous gas heaters. Will rifled through his pockets for a match, then re-crossed his arms and watched her light up, looking a little smug and uncommonly happy while she, under the rising wisp of blueish smoke, thought how nice it felt to watch, smell, and hold this little thing, and how good Will had been to think of procuring it. 

She wasn’t nearly vain enough to assume that he might have done this with ulterior motives, or to suspect that he might have planned to ask to drive her home tomorrow. That clearly had been the champagne and the boredom talking. They’d both get back to their senses soon enough and forget it, but in the meantime this cigar tasted absolutely delicious. 

‘Happy?’ he asked. 

‘Much happier yes, thanks.’

‘You’re very welcome.’

She smiled back through her smoke, perfectly content. Why shouldn’t she be: he looked gorgeous happy, with that new spark in his dark eye and the little brackets lingering in his lean cheeks either side of his mouth. Miles out of her league, of course, and she still had no idea what had come over him, but why question it? There was no point anyway: he just didn’t add up. And hey, who was she to complain about a silly bit of non-committal fun at the end of a very dull day, with a great cigar and by far the best looking person on this terrace? They’d all be back to the grind at the office soon enough. Neil was making his way over to them this very moment, and his presence soon finished dispelling what was left of the moment. 

‘There you are! Didn’t know you smoked,’ he said.

‘I don’t,’ she agreed, blew out, and went to find an ashtray before the nicotine headache got too much, and before the other half of the crowd on the terrace started staring at her too.

‘A woman smoking a cigar?’ she overheard, and recognised Jane’s boss, ‘Whatever next?’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> copyright 2021 Mel Liffragh, all rights reserved.


	22. Ill Met by Moonlight

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Hello dear readers. I'll be posting two long chapters this weekend, this one and one tomorrow. Then there's two more next week to finish the story, and a bonus chapter the week after and then... the end._   
>  _Or will it be? I've been really touched and amazed by the traction this story has gained over the course of a few months, so I have decided to try submitting it to some agents once I have posted it here in full._   
>  _The thing is, neither AO3 nor Fanfic can tell me how many unique readers I have, probably because a lot of you read as guests and that's fine: I don't like registering for stuff either. But it's also a shame because that would be one really useful number to show to a prospective agent - can you tell by now that I like numbers? I'm not sure how to get around that, but for sure it would help me if in the next few weeks you bookmarked the story if you are a member, or left any kind of review if you are not, anything at all along the lines of "I'm reading this"._
> 
> copyright 2021 Mel Liffragh, all rights reserved.
> 
> _Oh, and if you want to exhort all your mates to read it that's fine too ;-)_
> 
> _Also, talking of reviews, please know that each and every one of them lifts up my day so thank you ever so much._
> 
> _And now read on an enjoy: if you've got this far I think you will._  
>  _All the best, stay safe._  
>  _Mel_  
>  \-------------------------------------------------------------------------------  
> 

‘She’s cack-handed, she’s bound to fluff it,’ Will said from the other end of an immense billiard table. 

‘Again,’ he added, his arms crossed as usual, and although ostensibly he was talking to his team-mate Jan-the-Dane, his last remark had been for Elisabeth’s benefit. She knew it was late, but she had no idea whether it was just past her bedtime, or way past her bedtime. Unluckily for her long-suffering teammate, Neil, it was her turn to play.

‘Seriously, I’ve never seen her finish a cup of coffee without spilling some,’ Will went on. 

She might not have found it so infuriatingly distracting if he hadn’t just stuffed his tie into his pocket after the last frame and undone his top shirt button, leaving her in a mild panic about where to keep her eyes. 

‘Don’t listen to him, El-isabeth.’ Neil said with saintly patience, and his most reassuring Scottish burr, ‘Just push that wee rrred in gently.’

‘OK, I’ll try,’ she said, only too glad to focus back onto the green baize of the table. She started fiddling about trying to line her cue with the white ball and the red’s nearest corner hole. 

‘Watch out, Neil, she’s gonna put the eight in. Elisabeth, you’re gonna put the black in.’

‘Thanks for the translation, Will,’ she said, rising up from the table and making sure to keep her eyes well away from between the end bits of his collar, ‘And so far this evening how many have you seen me put in in, what, five games?’

‘Dunno, two?’ he asked with crossed arms, thrown-back shoulders and a cocky smile.

‘One, actually. That second one wasn’t the one I was aiming for.’

‘Right.’

‘So I just don’t know why you waste your psychological warfare on me, Will. Statistically I’m able to fluff this quite without your input, thank you very much.’

Jan and Neil now started smiling too. But seriously, good job she sucked at this anyway, else his latest move with the tie would have put her right off her game. 

‘OK, now, Neil, what is it I’m trying to do here?’ she asked, dragging her attention back to the table.

‘Aim about here,’ Neil said, pint in one hand, the index finger of the other hovering half an inch right of the red ball. To Elisabeth it looked like the black was in the way and the hole wasn’t, but Neil despite copious amounts of beer had managed to stay completely on top of things, and to win the previous game. She by contrast, despite being stone cold sober, or rather because she had been throughout, had established with certainty that she had no understanding of pool, whatsoever.

‘OK,’ she said, and blew a strand of hair off her face while sending the white ball off, without undue care or indeed hope of success: ‘Like that?’

For once she managed to send the ball off gently, rather than either missing it, or whacking it off into the table’s edges as she’d been doing all night. The white hit the red and indeed knocked it sideways towards the opposite corner pocket. The white did for an awful moment look like it might be heading for the near pocket, but it slowed and stopped about an inch away from the hole.

‘Faaaan-tastic!’ Neil cried, ‘Great! OK, Elisabeth, stay with it, can you just do this one more time?’

‘Probably not.’

‘No way,’ said Will.

‘Easy shot, Elisabeth. Don’t listen to him.’

‘She never does anyway.’

‘Yes thanks, Will,’ she said, keeping her eyes on Neil. ‘OK so tell me, where do I aim this time?’

Neil led her around the table, and started hovering his index finger to one side of the black ball. She bent down, took aim, frowned, and got up again. 

‘Are you sure? There?’ she asked, fiddling with her hair. 

A slow, confident nod.

‘OK, then.’

But before she bent back down something– she hoped it was only the expectation of another taunt- made her look Will’s way. He held her gaze for a second, then cocked one eyebrow. She frowned and looked away, aimed again, and pocketed the black.

‘Bra-vo!’ Neil cried with uncharacteristic abandon.

‘Thank you!’ she replied, beaming, gave a little curtsey and leant her cue against the table to tuck back that still rebellious strand of hair. Just as she was advising Will and Jan to “eat poo” she heard her cue crash down onto the parquet. 

‘Oh dear, never mind,’ she shrugged, picked it up again and this time popped it on top of the table. ‘I’ll go and powder my nose.’ 

She took off, aiming to grab a quiet moment to herself before bed. A ray of moonshine caught her eye as she turned a corner into a long corridor, lined on its right with ornate, properly Parisian-looking French doors onto the hotel’s back lawn. Most of them were locked, but eventually she managed to open one near the end of the corridor, and stepped out onto a shallow Bath-stone terrace. A dozen steps separated it from the grass below. She settled herself on the middle step, pulled her half-spent cigar out of her back pocket, got it going again, then gathered her burnt matches into a neat little pile next to her and enjoyed the caramel taste of the smoke in her mouth and the feel of the crisp night air on her flushed cheeks. She hugged her knees with one arm, rested the other elbow on her knees, and popped her smiling chin onto her cigar-holding hand. 

She’d made sure to sit outside the pool of light projecting from the hotel’s windows, but the night all around her was so bright that even her small clouds of smoke cast their own shadows as they drifted over the steps. An almost full moon had risen above the line of trees far across the lawn, cutting out each of their leafless twigs in black filigree against a silvery sky. She watched, and smoked, and smiled at what she knew to be one of life’s rare and fleeting moments of perfection. How long could it last? And did she feel happier and calmer than she had in ages, she wondered, because of the moon’s beauty, or because she’d been having far too much fun with... 

‘There you are. Doing a runner again?’

Think of the devil. She shrugged but did not turn as Will came to sit down on the step, to the other side of her stack of burnt matches.

‘Smoke gave you away: nice spot you found here.’

She nodded slowly and, out of the corner of her eye, she saw him look down the stairs over his knees. 

‘You sure you’re OK?’ he asked.

‘Aha.’

‘Good, you’re a great sport.’ 

She frowned for a second, then decided for once not to over-analyse things **.** Now that he was here she found she didn’t mind, he’d managed to blend into the scene without distracting her away from its perfection. For a while she stayed silent, and then addressed herself to the tree line, and with admirable grace he did the same:

‘Are you OK?’ she asked. 

‘Yeah, ’course.’

She saw his shadow shrug as he said this, and raised a sceptical eyebrow. She sent another puff of smoke a little further, onto the lawn. A breeze was bending the grass below them into gleaming waves, and in that second she might have been Neptune, sending clouds over an angry sea, just for the hell of it. 

‘What?’ he asked.

‘Nothing, it’s just that, you’ve hardly been yourself tonight.’

‘In what way?’

‘Oh, come on...’

His shadow shook its head.

‘Well, let’s just say you’ve seemed considerably happier than usual.’

‘I’m generally a very happy guy.’

‘Hmmm, not around the office, no.’

‘Around the office I’m sat in front of Andy all day, trying not to screw up my trades and not to piss you off.’

‘I know, tall order… I mean I get to sit in front of Master Yoda, trying not to break tradePad and not to piss you off.’

‘You don’t piss me off anymore.’

‘I know, you don’t really piss me off anymore either,’ she said, her eyes still tracking the course of her smoke clouds. 

‘But I used to, right?’ 

‘Oh yeah, big time,’ she nodded, ‘But then I do believe that in your case pissing me off was deliberate whereas I wasn’t actually trying to be annoying, believe it or not.’

‘I’m sorry.’

Her left temple started pounding, which told her she’d had enough nicotine. She set the cigar down on the edge of the step next to her, and wrapped both her arms around her knees. 

‘Why, though? What did I do?’ she asked a tree two hundred yards away. 

‘Nothing. My bad: you can’t help being so much smarter than the rest of us.’

She frowned. 

‘And better with computers and therefore Raj’s number one pet,’ Will said, to the lawn. 

‘What?’

‘Oh come on, Elisabeth, it’s bloody obvious. You should have heard how pleased he was with himself for poaching you from Toad: Elisabeth Bennet this, Elisabeth Bennet that! I’m sorry it got to me though. He was right, we’re lucky to have you.’

Elisabeth had to smile. It made sense that Will should have wanted to take her down a peg or two if Raj had indeed praised her to him half as much as he’d praised Will to her. Traders are selected on their single minded obsession with their own performance, and Will wouldn’t be as good at his job as indeed he was, if he wasn’t also borderline pathologically over-competitive. He simply had to be the best at everything, from trading to rowing, spoof, running... It definitely tickled Elisabeth’s pride to think that he might have considered poor little her as any threat to his work mojo. 

‘Thank you, Will. You’re very kind. Glad Raj found you too.’

She stared on into the edge of the sky, where it met the trees, then as her eyes swept back down towards her feet she finally understood what was so mesmerising about this scene: under this light the large but otherwise banal, trite garden in front of her had acquired an appearance of depth. The grass, the sky, the trees even, it was like looking at deep water from on high, too boundless not to be a little scary, but also begging you to dive in. 

A bit like that square inch of skin between the ends of Will’s shirt collar, she thought with a private smile: unknowable and all the more compelling for it. She shut her eyes, opened them again and, having committed the landscape to memory, she smiled to herself again. 

‘You know, Elisabeth, you never smile like this around the office. More’s the pity.’

She turned to him: she had no idea how long he’d been looking at her like this, but he too was smiling a smile she hadn’t seen on him around the desk. The same kind of happy, perhaps slightly cocky, definitely flirty, and so far irresistible smile he’d had earlier at the bar. And for a good part of the evening in the games room too. She felt her eyes wander towards his neck again: she knew she ought to feel embarrassed, she ought not to stare, she ought not even to look there or look amused and above all she ought not to give his flirty remark a flirty reply. But she felt happy and not one bit bothered, so she looked him back in the eye, she did look amused, she didn’t even begin to blush and she said:

‘You’re right, Will. I should make more of an effort, we both should.’

Right now of course the only effort she was having to make was not to strain her face smiling so much, but never mind. 

‘This isn’t an effort,’ Will answered in his calm, pleasant voice, meanwhile shaking his handsome, unflappably smiling head. They held each other’s gaze for a moment longer.

Eventually it did dawn on her that this may be inappropriate, and she turned her eye to the night sky again. If anything it was even more beautiful than before, the moon’s face taunting them, half hidden behind a single wispy cloud. Then all of a sudden she became intensely aware of the chill of the night, and of the need to bring this encounter to a close, fun though it had been. 

‘Better turn in, Will: I think you’re pretty drunk,’ she said, forcing on her sensible voice, and felt a shudder of cold go up her spine. 

‘I’m not that drunk, but sure.’ 

‘No, you definitely are.’

‘Am not.’

‘Will, you just pretty much came on to the desk quant. Trust me, you’ll regret this when the cheap champagne goggles come off.’

‘Will I?’

‘I should think so.’

‘I’m not even sure you will.’

OK, cross out “pretty much” in “just pretty much came on to the desk quant”. Not half bad at it either. Come on now, time for a graceful exit before she said or did anything even sillier. Oh, but if he would only stop smiling and do that button back up, maybe then she might start to act sensibly? 

‘OK fine, Will, whatever, you’re right. Let’s go.’

‘I’m right? Did the desk quant just say I’m right and she’s wrong?’

‘Yes, Will. Of course, Will. You’re right, Will. Look, I’ve just done it again!’

‘It’s my lucky night.’

‘Whatever you say, Will, oh and that makes three!’

‘Now you’re just being contrary.’

‘God, you are so right. Four. Is this getting to you yet? Pretty please?’

Boy, did he look good! Very good and very off limits, she reminded herself. Out of her league, for a start, but also well out of bounds. 

‘You’d never be able to keep it up long enough,’ he said with a look far from collegial. 

‘Also true, five,’ she said, unable not to return it. 

‘Come on then, let’s turn in.’

He shot up and held a hand down for her. She took it and hoisted herself up. As soon as she did the weariness of the hour caught up with her. 

It wasn’t until they’d reached the French doors again that she realised he'd set her hand onto his forearm and that she'd left it there, nice and warm under his. It all felt perfectly nice - comfortable and not actually flirty or inappropriate, just nice - until the electric light inside shook her back to her senses. She let go, and with her hands safely off him she bid him a somewhat standoffish good night and walked away, repeating to herself all the way down the long corridors that “it was just a bit of harmless fun”. 

***

When the alarm went the next morning at quarter to nine it felt like she’d only just gone to sleep. It took her a while to work out that the voices she heard were coming from Radio 4 and that she was in room 1203 at the Dale Hall hotel. Then the timeline came back to her as well: she’d gone to bed about two thirty, she’d been awake from about 4 to 6:am feeling nauseous and with a mouth like an ashtray. So yes, she had indeed only just got back to sleep. And now… well now her head didn’t hurt too much, provided she did not try to move it. This was why she didn’t smoke anymore. 

Normally. 

She slouched out of bed, and downed in one the bottle of Voss on the coffee table. Then she ran her body under the powerful jets of hot water in the wet room, put her last set of fresh clothes on and started chucking things back into her bag, the heavy conference folders first, at the bottom. 

All the while something was bothering her, as if she was forgetting something important and possibly shameful. Clearly she would have to go straight from breakfast to check out to… Ah yes, that was it. Oh dear. That cheeky cigar: not only did she feel like death served up cold, but she was now supposed to be heading back in Will’s car, and in the cold light of this winter day it now struck her as a very bad idea. She told herself that lots of people were giving each other rides back this morning, so it wasn’t a big deal. Yet somehow, somewhere between her concrete-capped head and the pit of her queasy stomach, it was.

She checked her room, shook the sheets, retrieved a lone sock, checked the bathroom, found her room-key card next to the basin and finally left the room holding her coat and bag. From a practical perspective, she continued to think along the meandering corridors, he was without a doubt going to drive some silly toy-car far too fast, and she felt nauseous enough as it was without boy-racing all the way back to London. More to the point, right now Will too would probably be feeling very silly. Not about the drive back, that was no biggie, but about the flirting last night. There had definitely been more teasing than is appropriate between esteemed colleagues. And although she could honestly say that he’d started it, she could also see she’d gone right along with it, like a very silly little… goose. Would she never learn? He must be mortified. Surely he must be. She certainly was, she couldn’t even argue she’d been too drunk to know what she was doing. Which surely he had been. 

Surely. 

The breakfast room was busier than she had expected given that, according to the schedule, they were all supposed to be on the shuttle back to the station. She grabbed a large mug, filled it to the brim with black coffee, and went to plonk herself next to Neil and his new friend, the girl from the bus, whose corkscrew hair was now gathered up in a neat bun behind her head, enhancing the feline delicacy of her features.

‘Morning, Elisabeth: Natasha Burke. Natasha: Elisabeth Bennet. She works with us on the desk.’

‘Yes I’ve seen you around,’ said Natasha with a very friendly smile, and despite being seized by an unhealthy dose of glamour-envy Elisabeth could not bring herself to hate the girl. 

‘You’re one of the new VPs, aren’t you? Congratulations. Heard you guys are doing really well with those new UCITS.’

‘Thanks, are you not eating?’

‘I don’t think I could swallow anything just yet.’

‘Haven’t we got to go anyway? There’s a line to check out,’ Neil said. ‘How are you getting back?’

‘Same way I came I suppose, train into King’s Cross,’ said Natasha. ‘I’d better go and pack up quickly. It’s very nice to meet you, Elisabeth.’

‘And you, Natasha.’

‘I’ll see you at reception?’ Neil offered.

‘Sure!’ she replied coyly, and turned to go. 

‘I gather you’re no longer staying for that round of golf then?’ Elisabeth teased him.

‘Decided against it,’ he replied, playing it cool.

‘You could do a lot worse.’

‘She's so beautiful!’ he agreed, treating Natasha’s perfection as a major personal achievement. 

Which in a way it was, of course.

‘And so well groomed!’ Elisabeth concurred with genuine admiration. Natasha reminded her of a younger, browner version of Jane. Or of the woman she’d always imagined Baudelaire’s _Invitation au voyage_ to be about, quietly exuding “order and beauty, calm and luxury”. Of a feminine ideal, in short, that Elisabeth herself was pretty sure she would never to reach, but especially not on the day after the cigar-smoking night before. 

‘Dunno how people like her do it,’ she mused, shaking her head as she took another sip of coffee. The caffeine started to cross her blood-brain barrier and her meninges eased off a fraction. Then her bag buzzed, and Sod's law meant her phone had sunk to the bottom, under the conference folders. She got herself a paper-cut as she extracted the effing thing, too late to take the call. 

From Will. Blood from her finger had got all over her phone, and presumably all over her clothes inside the bag. She dipped a napkin in someone’s leftover glass of ice water, wrapped it around her thumb, then read his text: ‘Morning, where are you?’

‘Here, obviously,’ she texted back, painstakingly using her extra clumsy right thumb rather than her ordinarily clumsy left one, then shoved the phone into her back pocket and stood up.

She only queued for check-out for a few minutes, bag at her feet and left thumb up in the air. It probably had stopped bleeding by now, but she didn’t dare take the paper towel off to check. 

‘You’re late,’ she heard as soon as she was done with the receptionist. 

She looked for Will but could not spot him in the rest of the checkout line. Then she realised that the longer of the two pairs of legs sat on the lobby’s matching red Chesterfields must be his, sticking out below an open copy of the _Weekend FT_ ’s main section. 

‘And a very good morning to you too, Will,’ she said, pleased to find that she was able to sound very much like herself. 

‘Good morning!’ he said brightly, pulling the paper down. The left bracket next to his mouth was already open, and the right one appeared as soon as he’d taken one look at her face: no, he definitely didn’t look mortified. She tucked her hair back while she wondered whether this was a good or a bad thing. Unable to find the answer she tried to think instead how to provide them both with a graceful escape route. This wasn’t helped by the fact that the top button of his rugby shirt was undone: not his fault of course, only twats and quants wear rugby shirts done all the way up, nonetheless…

‘Well look, Will, since you’re in a hurry don’t worry about me: I can make my own way back, they put on a late shuttle, I can see it from here. See you tomorrow?’

‘Don’t be daft, Elisabeth. It’s vile out there,’ he said, tilting his head towards the window behind him and folding his paper away. 

‘Are you sure?’

‘Positive. Come on!’ he said, springing up and gallantly picking up both of their bags. 

Perhaps the cold outside air finally shook her back to her senses, but after a few steps on the gravel she quit worrying. Either he had no recollection of their exchanges last night, or if he did he was making a sterling effort at shoving them under the carpet. Both alternatives were fine by her: she felt far too sick and tired for anything more complicated. 

They walked in silence past scattered Porsches, Beamers, Jags, a couple of Audi TTs; she even spotted the CEO’s yellow Maserati in the distance. Eventually Will stopped next to a small black car and watched her carry on. She realised she’d lost him after a few paces, and turned around, frowning. Then she took a look at the car next to him, an H-Reg Golf, and back at him again: he’d put the bags down to go through his pockets.

‘That’s your car?’ she asked, pointing at it with one of her outsized arms. 

‘Aha,’ he said, and started to open the boot. She retraced her last few steps and saw him chuck their identical bags in, next to a muddy pair of trainers, a battered road atlas and a manky tartan blanket. He slammed the boot shut.

‘Nice motor!’ she said with the utmost sincerity. Everyone knows German cars go on forever, but this was something else. Probably something his parents had handed down to him to head off to college. Give it another couple of years and it would be vintage. Now he was the one looking befuddled:

‘Nice?’

‘I expected you to have one of those,’ she said, her eyes full of surprise, relief and tiredness as she thumbed across to some of the racier models across the alley. She waited for his reaction, idly observing that he’d cut himself shaving, the smallest of nicks across one of those little brackets that formed around his mouth when he smiled.

But Will wasn’t smiling.

‘Yours is miles better!’ she said, and thank goodness his face relaxed again. 

‘I’m sorry, there's no central locking,’ he said and got in, then reached across to her side to unlock her door. Inside all was satisfyingly grotty, the kind of vehicle which, like every happy dog, gets taken on muddy outings on a regular basis. He switched on the de-mister, which made her decide to take her coat off. But since she’d already fastened her seat belt it was a bit of a struggle. He watched her for a while, in much the same way she’d watched him think a minute ago, then without a word he grabbed her right sleeve and held it so she could pull her arm free. 

Taking the rest of her coat off was a doddle, and soon she did buckle back up. But as they drove off she realised that she was in fact a bit cold, and pulled her coat back up to her neck over the seat belt. He smiled to himself behind the wheel and fair enough, all this faffing around was probably good “entertainment value”.

Her brain settled into counting the plane trees on either side of the gravelled drive through the hotel’s estate. She got to thirty-four when he stopped at the gates. The February sky was looking more threatening by the minute, and the first few drops of rain splashed down onto the windscreen. On her side of the gate she spotted that particularly elegant tree she’d been staring at from the terrace the night before –a copper beech, round crowned and leaning nonchalantly to one side. She realised they were now following a hilly, windy country road, and that she hadn’t noticed Will getting up and down the gears. 

Huh, maybe her stomach was going to be OK? The car was beginning to warm up now, the wipers swishing from side to side at a peaceful adagio, which lulled her brain into a pleasantly contemplative mood. She snuggled up into her coat and felt herself relax.

‘You OK?’ he asked, glancing her way in between two bends.

‘I’m fine. Thank you.’

‘Good.’

He carried on driving, occasionally turning to look at her, then back at the road. In only a few weeks, four or five if they had a whiff of an early Spring, this landscape would start to become bucolic. A maze of low hedges was spread over the hills, separating larger dark brown patches from smaller grass fields. But for now no cattle was out, and even birds were scarce and slow. They drove past a copse, and then she saw the approach to the M25 in the distance below them. Warm at last, she shrugged her coat down and it brushed painfully on her injured thumb, which she now took to examining, tugging timidly at the paper towel a few inches in front of her glasses. 

‘You all right?’ he asked again. 

She nodded.

‘What’s with your thumb?’

‘Paper cut. When you called. From the conference folders in my bag.’

‘Sorry about that.’

She shrugged, and peeled off the last piece of tissue with a wince. The cut started halfway up the cuticle and went round and down into the pad. It would throb like hell when she typed tomorrow. But apart from that she felt like a lazy cat on a winter stove: warm, quiet, and not half smug about it. 

Their CEO’s Maserati made a point of undercutting them as it merged into the traffic, then fishtailed into the middle lane and past the lorry Will was about to start overtaking. He took his foot off the pedal and switched his indicator off, then switched it back on for a left at the next exit. The M1, already? She checked the clock on the dashboard: according to it they’d been driving for over half an hour, which just could not be.

‘Is that the right time?’ she asked. 

‘It is, why, do you need to get somewhere?’

‘No no, it’s just...’ she watched him drive for a few seconds, long enough for him to notice and wonder what was up, so she looked back through the windshield again and then it occurred to her that she couldn’t think of many people, apart from him, who could both talk articulately and yet know when and how to shut up for a whole half hour. 

‘You sure you’re OK? You’re not normally this quiet.’

‘I know, you neither. It’s nice, isn’t it?’

‘It’s nice to see you happy,’ he nodded, and then very considerately he shut up again. She rested her elbow on the thin ledge at the bottom of the window and leant her lazy head on her hand watching the landscape turn from brown to grey as they neared London and, presumably the mythical North Circular. 

Again he looked at her:

‘So where am I turning off?’

‘What?’

‘Which exit am I taking?’

‘Are we actually on the North Circular?’

‘What do you think? So what exit are you?’

‘I don’t know.’

She looked at the signs above the road and tried to think about it, but she just didn’t have that particular piece of information about her flat.

‘What do you mean, you don’t know?’

Oh, so normal transmission had resumed, then. It had to happen eventually. 

‘I mean I don’t have a car, do I? I hate driving. Don’t you have a Sat-nav we can check?’

‘What?’

‘One of these Tom Tom things.’

‘Please spare me the technicalities.’

‘Alright! A road atlas?’

‘In the boot.’

‘Well, that’s not a very clever place for it now, is it?’

‘Oh come on, A1! Are you down the A1?’

‘The A something is near me, after Holloway road it’s either the A1 or the A1000.’

‘Fucking typical.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Just as well you don’t work with numbers. Golders Green, ‘that near you?’

‘I think we need to go further. After Archway there’s Highgate, and then the Finchleys. Golders Green’s definitely on the wrong branch.’

‘We’re not on the tube, in case you hadn’t noticed.’

‘I know! I’m sorry, only trying to help! I thought you lived around here, perhaps.’

He shook his head and rolled his eyes. 

‘I’m sorry,’ she said again, trying not to aggravate him by showing how funny she found seeing him like this again. ‘Look, the next one says Holloway, that’ll be OK.’

‘Good.’

‘You see, there you go! All sorted.’ 

In truth she had no idea, but they carried on down the dual carriage way and eventually reached more residential areas, and passed the Highgate tube.

‘I know where we are now! Carry on straight down. Where do you live anyway, then?’

‘Butler’s Wharf.’

‘I see. Not too out of your way, at least.’

He made no reply. They negotiated Archway roundabout, and turned down Holloway road.

‘Nearly there!’ she said encouragingly. 

‘My, isn’t this a nice neighbourhood,’ he replied with obvious sarcasm. 

‘Isn’t it just? Very up and coming.’

‘I bet, yes, let me know when it’s up and come.’

‘But by then it’ll be too late to invest and you’ll have missed out on the upside. OK OK, turn left, not that one! That one, good!’

‘Even nicer.’

‘Oh come on, don’t be precious. Now just go to the end and turn right.’

‘…’

‘OK now there, behind the Moonbus.’

‘The what?’

‘Orange thing, there! Great! Thanks,’ she said as he pulled up in front of the steps. Home again! She picked up her coat and staged a reverse manoeuvre of her earlier performance, much to his amusement.

‘So this is where you live?’ he said when she’d finished.

‘Aha, basement flat.’

She checked her coat pockets and bent down to retrieve her wallet from off the floor, while trying to think up something along the lines of ‘Well thanks again, you must be in a hurry so don’t get out, etc’. But she felt a draft as she lifted her head back up and found Will standing outside, holding her car door open. She got out and he closed it behind her, then went to get her bag from the boot. Still carrying it, he followed her into the minuscule space under the stairs. 

What now? Too late for the line about not getting out. She didn’t come from the sort of family that holds car doors open for womenfolk so she was already well out of her depth etiquette-wise: would a cup of tea be polite? Expected?

‘Do you want to pop in, meet my flatma-’

‘No thanks,’ he said before she finished, shaking his head at the brass number on the door. Well, that was a relief. He put her bag down: 

‘OK then. Thanks for the ride, Will, see you tomorrow,’ she said, reached for his hand and leant forward to kiss him goodbye, but he swayed back and away from her and, in doing so, he knocked the back of his head on the stairs above them. 

What now? Since that pool night after the tradePad launch, and the protests about Dean getting preferential treatment, she kissed all the traders on both cheeks after a social. As far as she was aware this was the new, improved, continentalised-in-her-honour, off-duty protocol, and thus far she hadn’t taken any complaints about it. 

Yet here was Will frowning at her, still shaking her right hand, and still rubbing the back of his head with his left. Her mind boggled and her right hand began to warm up inside his while her left instinctively reached up for the comfort of her hair. That made him smile: his eyes lit up and those lovely little lines appeared on either side of his mouth. He stopped rubbing the back of his head and put his hand on the front door instead, and then he leant in and kissed her. 

On the lips, as you do.


	23. Off limits

Some time later Will turned around and left. Elisabeth let herself in and leant back against the closed door, waiting for her wits to make their own lackadaisical way into the flat. It took a few seconds, but gradually she became aware of the TV’s noise coming in from the lounge, and thought her senses might be returning. Only then did she start taking her coat off, very slowly and carefully, until it hung up on the peg, completely creaseless. 

Aaah, how perfect. What a delightful - chaste, almost - over-in-a-moment little moment. She gave her coat another needless pat, musing that this was Fitzwilliam Kingsley Darcy she’d just kissed. She ought to feel at least a bit shocked, mildly outraged, possibly a little angry? But no, she felt fine. Her lips were still tingling and her head felt light, dizzy, kind of … blonde, perhaps? 

How strange.

Even more strange, for once in her life she was able to shrug it off, to take a deep breath and to walk back into her lovely living room with her head held up high and a self-satisfied smile still hovering on her lips. Ben looked away from the football and turned to talk to her over the back of the sofa:

‘Good weekend?’

‘Good in parts,’ she replied, suddenly and violently aware of her lips again – but in a nice way. 

‘Just got back, right?’

‘Uh, yes.’

‘There’s a letter for you, it’s on the fridge.’

‘Oh OK, thanks!’

She went to her room, had a shower then a lovely snooze, and for the first time in ages she woke up with a smile on her face. 

When she re-emerged around four in the afternoon it did not look like Ben had moved at all although he must have, judging by the additional food debris strewn all around him. He’d had to change channels, but on Sundays there was always enough sports on the telly to keep him glued to the sofa. She chucked away his leftover beans on toast, plonked herself on the floor, leant her back against the side of the sofa so she wouldn’t be distracted by the TV, grabbed his discarded copy of _News of the Screws_ and started scanning the front page kiss-and-tell about some footballer, who according to an inarticulate but extremely pneumatic exotic dancer, was less than generously endowed but had nonetheless made love to her “like a wild animal”. 

‘Elisabeth?’ Ben started.

‘Aha.’

‘You opened that letter yet?’

‘No, why? Is it from my parole officer?’

‘Don’t think so,’ he replied as if she’d been serious. ‘But I think you should open it.’

‘You only say that ‘cos you want me to grab you a beer from the fridge while I’m at it.’

‘No, I’m OK. But you should open it.’

Elisabeth finished the story and got up to put the kettle on and get her mail. 

It was rare, even back then, to receive a hand-written envelope with UK stamps on. The only people with whom Elisabeth still kept a terrestrial rather than an electronic correspondence were her grandma and a couple of her nicer aunties in France, and well-wishers for birthdays and Christmases. Anxiety rose in her chest as saw that the letter had been posted from Oxford. Better open that one in her bedroom then. 

‘Elisabeth?’ Ben stopped her as she opened the door to the corridor.

‘Mm?’

‘Who was it you were snogging under the stairs?’ he asked, without looking at her. 

‘Who said I snogged him back?’ she said, and let the door shut after her.

She sat down on the futon, or rather sprawled onto it, her back to the wall, and waited for panic to truly hit her, the way she imagined one might watch the approach of a freight train whilst tied to the rail-tracks. Until Ben had asked about it she’d been absolutely fine –better than fine, in fact. She’d napped like a baby and walked an inch taller than usual. What a delightful, almost chaste, over-in-a-moment little moment, right? 

Well, no. 

Where to start? At the end? At her hands. At her hands at the end. At the end her right hand had peeled itself off Will’s chest. That’s right: Fitzwilliam Kingsley Darcy’s chest. Which meant it must have found its way there in the first place, somehow. And pressed into it. Or against it, conceivably, but she rather feared she’d pressed into it, not against. And found it warm, and just the right kind of firm, damn him. 

As for her left hand, her good writing hand: she stared at it, and its fingers suddenly remembered wrapping themselves around the back of Will’s neck. They remembered the unexpected smoothness his skin against that of her fingertips. And at the very same moment the sides of Elisabeth’s head remembered Will’s fingers weaving and searching through her hair. 

Chaste little kisses do not involve such urgent fingers.

So really, who cared if she’d “snogged him back” or not? She would have, in just another suspended heartbeat. She would, she absolutely would have eaten his face up, snogged him for France and England put together, nothing but nothing at all chaste about that. Was that why he’d stopped? She couldn’t be sure but she rather thought he was the one who’d stopped. She knew he’d started it, for sure, and not in an “oops missed your cheek sorry” way either, no. Not Will. Oh God! Had she been about to eat Will’s face up? Why would that feel so…

Good?

Better than good, right? Walking in she’d thought it had been delightful. Perfect. Dizzy, kind-of-blonde-making. No no no no no, this couldn’t be happening. Well, it wasn’t happening now, but it couldn’t have happened either. 

Except that it had. 

For how long, she’d never know. Long enough for Ben to wonder what was going on at the front door. Ben, who wasn’t easily distracted from football on the telly so no, not an “over-in-a-moment” moment either. 

She’d lost track of time. _Will_ had made her lose track of time. First he’d done it in the car, what with the warmth and the comfortable silence, and then he’d done it again, with his mouth on hers. Had she gone completely mad? She must have. She must have gone mad, but him? Lord knew what his excuse was. 

A momentary lapse of reason, surely, she tried to talk herself down. Perhaps it hadn’t lasted very long after all. Perhaps she was just shocked, that was all. It was a pretty shocking thing for him to have done. It felt a little bit more manageable if she thought of it as a thing that he had done, not her. If she thought of her hand pressing him away, not trying to melt into his perfect chest and become one with it. 

Her eyes fell back on the envelope that her other hand, in its confusion, had dropped to the floor. That did not help. She hadn’t seen Tom’s handwriting before but it was just like him: black and white, spidery, uneven. She could still feel Will’s lips on hers, Will’s hair under her fingers, and she had no idea anymore what she was more uneasy about, that or the letter on the floor. Should she just throw it away? What the hell was she going to say, or possibly do, to Will in the morning? Of course she couldn’t just throw the letter away. Did she just want to know Tom was all right? Or did she want to know that he was missing her rotten? And what the hell was Will going to say for himself in the morning? He definitely hadn’t been pissed this time. She opened the envelope.

_The Bombsite, Summertown._

_Thursday, 20th of February_

_I’ve been here ten days now. In that time I’ve written you thirty letters, twelve poems, and a song. They’re all rubbish._

_There once was a man from Wiltshire_

_Who went mad the moment he saw her…_

_See? Can’t even make it scan. Mostly they’re all about my love for you, but you’ve made it clear you’re not interested in that kind of talk just yet. The bin doesn’t seem terribly interested either. So let’s see whether this one finds its way to London and to you. Are you sitting comfortably? I’m not: it’s bloody cold in this kitchen. Are you still angry with me? I’m still angry with me, I miss you. Wait wait, I caught myself in time. Don’t worry, I’ll stop. I won’t go on about my love, I’ll tell you about my love_

_-ly life here instead._

_Work called on Monday, which was very nice of them, wasn’t it? At first I wondered how they’d got my number. I wondered whether you’d passed it on, whether perhaps they’d been lucky enough to talk to your real voice, rather than to the one that haunts my substance-induced dreams. I was envious. But apparently Ben gave them the number. They’d been a bit worried, you see, because I left without quitting properly, but it’s all cleared up now and anyway, what’s the point of quitting a job if you have to quit properly?_

_So I’m just your regular trust fund waster again: during the day when I’m not writing to you here I go and watch Sara paint and write to you there instead. She’s still with her gallery owner. Her name is Vera and, disturbingly, she looks just like an older and Frencher version of you. She’s as tall as you are, even skinnier, bigger glasses, and only ever wears black. Sara spends her nights with her and her days with me, when I feel up to it. She’s smoking far too much, we both are. So I’m getting thinner and sometimes violently paranoid. Perhaps that’s what she’s got too. She’s not sculpting anymore, but she’s making this picture of the four of us. Except she’s never seen you properly, so you have the body of a crab and two huge pincers for arms. One of them is slicing me in two, the other she tells me will be lifting my innards in the air. I don’t think it’s entirely fair to have given you the body of a crab. You have a very nice body, what I did get to see of it._

_Stop now, Tom! Naughty! So yes, the painting’s rubbish too. It will be, when it’s finished. But we are all settling down nicely, as you see._

_No, bollocks to that: I’m lost. I’m fucked up, I’m drowning, I’m as unhappy as I’ve ever been, and you were right, I’m a silly little boy who can’t tear himself away. So last night when I’d drunk enough to catch some sleep I dreamt that you came and rescued me and I woke up smiling. Will you? Will you come and save me? You know where I live. And there’s a corner of that kitchen where I can stand and replay that day, last year, last century, when you walked into the light. I have to wait until about four o’clock in the afternoon on a sunny day to get it just right but that’s alright, I’ve got plenty of time on my hands now._

_Oh, do come! Walk through that door again, and all will be well._

_Yeah right, you won’t. You probably still hate me. Bollocks. I know you won’t come. You’ll let me pickle and smoke myself to death here. Because I’ve fucked up and gone and hurt you, and because nominative determinism’s gone boink, Elisabeth Ruth Bennet. You’re ruthless, so ruthless you won’t let yourself forgive me, even if it kills you too, even as I die over here of a splinter in the heart with your name on it._

_Shoo! Away, maudlin creature within! Stop before we have to tear that one too. Instead I will woo you back to me with diamonds from the purest night sky, with kisses for each of your fingers and toes and a thousand more for your lips, and another slither of my stout heart, served still warm and beating upon a silver plate for you, my love._

_Tom_

By the next morning she more or less knew the letter by heart. She also knew by heart the more laconic text Will had sent, just before midnight, and presumably by mistake. It said:

 _Elisabeth,_

She could not decide what she would have wanted him to have written next, let alone guess what he could have meant to write. All it conveyed with any clarity was that he too must have been mulling it over, hours and hours later. Whether light-headed with bliss or utterly mortified… she couldn’t be sure which of the alternatives was scarier. Her head had already been hurting before she’d received the text but afterwards it started to feel like a vice was being tightened around her temples, a quarter turn each time she moved her eyes from the letter in her left hand to the phone in her right, and back, until it became too painful to read either and she had to shut her eyes for a minute or two. 

Then she would almost fall asleep, and perhaps remember that moment of perfectly pure elation she’d savoured in the hall, and become unsure whether she’d just dreamt the whole thing. If so, it was one of the better dreams she’d had of late. But no, her phone was still there in her hand, reminding her she would have to see Will again tomorrow in the office, and then her chest would start to tighten and her head to hurt again and in the meantime she would read Tom’s letter once more and wonder what to do about that, so that by morning the only concrete action plan she’d been able to formulate was that she’d try and avoid Will, or at least avoid one on ones with him. 

To that end she hit the pool rather than the office first thing next morning, and made sure she didn’t reach her desk until well after the open, penalty coffee round in hand for everyone. 

It went swimmingly. 

The avoidance tactics continued to work so well all day that she suspected Will must be cooperating with her. Around 12:30 for instance, she stood up without so much as saving her last half hour’s work when she saw him walk back across the atrium after the fortnightly Operational Risk meeting. But as soon as Will saw her he turned on his heels, and rather than exit the atrium to his desk he crossed it all the way back to the other side. She considered sitting back down, but instead went out through the back stairwell to get a sandwich, and to try to gather her wits again. When she got back he was busy giving Credit Suisse what for on the phone and mercifully he didn’t look her way when she sat down. 

It started to look like with a bit of luck they might be able to brush the whole thing under the carpet, together with their numerous other embarrassing moments, and be done with it. She kept her eyes on her screen all afternoon, broke three perfectly good pieces of UNIX script, went home early to re-read Tom’s letter, and hardly slept. 

The next morning she was too exhausted to go swimming again, so she showed up at her regular time to find that Will and the coffees were waiting for her:

‘Morning, Elisabeth. Mind if we have these in 3.11 today?’ he asked as soon as her coat was off. He sounded perfectly normal, something she struggled to emulate as she answered him:

‘Right, uh... now?’

‘Yes, now.’

‘Right,’ she said, rooted to the spot by sheer blind and severely underslept panic. 

‘Go on then,’ he said, stood up and somehow managed to grab both their coffees and both their notepads.

‘Right,’ she mumbled, and followed him the few meters to the meeting room in stunned silence. They sat down, he shut the door. 7:08 on the clock. Elisabeth’s stomach felt ready to implode.

‘You might need this,’ he said, handing over her notepad.

‘Thanks,’ she said, opened it, and took heart. Perhaps this was just a tradePad catch up after all. Great! Phew, silly her. Of course it was. She took a deep breath, forced a timid smile on her face and looked up from her latest to-do page to him:

‘So what’s up then?’

‘Elisabeth, you know very well what’s up.’

Oh. So not tradePad after all, then? In which case she did have a fair idea, yes, but she was not prepared to go there unless she absolutely had to. 

‘I do?’ she asked, and swallowed hard. 

He, by contrast, was looking perfectly relaxed, leant back in his chair with his arms crossed as usual and his face looking almost amused: 

‘I see. OK, let’s spell this out for you then: how long do you reckon we can keep avoiding each other?’

‘I wasn’t avoid...’

Why bother? Her protest was pathetic, pitiful - laughable even, judging by the look on Will’s face. How could he be smiling at a time like this? When she couldn’t even get enough breath inside her to whisper two sensible words?

‘Like hell you weren’t avoiding me, Elisabeth, come on,’ he said, looking straight into her panicked eyes. She quickly lowered her gaze back to the safety of her notepad. He was right, as usual, she was going to need it. 

‘Look, I’m not going to apologise for Sunday,’ she heard him say, ‘Frankly I’d wanted to do that for a long time and I’m glad I’ve had a go. Clearly you didn’t like it and that’s a shame because I certainly did, but at least now I can stop kicking myself for being too much of a wuss to take a punt.’

Right, great, at least now he could stop kicking himself for being too much of a wuss to take a... 

What?!?! Her eyes froze, her brain went into tailspin and her next breath caught in her throat. She felt her fingers clench hard onto the edges of her notepad and she had no idea how long a time elapsed before he spoke again: 

‘You OK, Elisabeth? Look I’m hoping that if you were going to report me to Talent Management for harassment you’d have done it already by now, right?’

‘Hmmm?’ she said, ‘Oh believe me, Will, I could report you to Talent Management over way worse than that.’

If she’d been thinking straight, which she hadn’t since about 4:30 pm on Sunday, then she would have realised that Will wouldn’t hear that sentence and think: I must watch my language on the desk. He’d hear it and think: whoppee for me, she didn’t _not_ like it! And he’d be right about that too, and that would make her… a complete blabbering mess.

‘Great! So perhaps it wasn’t even that bad,’ he said, and his dark eyes shone briefly with that dangerous spark of Saturday night. She blushed to her ears. ‘That’s a relief, really, but if you’re going to be gracious enough not to get me sacked over it, then I suggest we both just get over the fact that I like you, I like you a lot, even, and just get on with life. What do you say?’

She looked at him, stunned and beetroot red as he smiled on. 

‘Oh come on, it’s not _that_ weird. How many girls like you do you know?’

She stared on at him, dumbstruck. Fabulous: what was he expecting her to say to that? She certainly hadn’t come across too many guys like him before either.

‘Right, chin up now, Elisabeth. You don’t have to say anything. In fact you’re right, silence between us can be extremely refreshing. But we do have some work to do, we’ve got that 3 o’clock with Deutsche tomorrow. So if I promise to be a good boy can we be cool?’

‘Sure.’

‘Great! Off we go then.’

He stood up. 7:10 on the clock. 

‘I’ll just go to the...’ she felt compelled to mutter back on the desk as she grabbed her phone and headed for the back staircase. Will tactfully pretended to be too busy to notice and after only a modicum of agonising Elisabeth decided that her situation did warrant interrupting Charlotte’s belated honeymoon.

‘Elisabeth, hi! How are you?’ came Charlotte’s cheerful voice after barely three rings. 

‘Charlie, hi, I’m sorry to gate-crash your honeymoon, how are...’

‘You’re not gate-crashing anything, darling! I was just enjoying a cocktail on the jetty watching Colin’s diving boat sail back in. How wifely of me is that?’

‘Very wifely,’ said Elisabeth, trying not to get too depressed as she gazed through the staircase’s narrow window, and into the cold smudge of grey dawn outside. 

‘And!’ Charlotte started, ‘You of all people will looooove Caroline's last email. I quote, and do pardon her French: _Homeless. Fucking bastard brother and his witch girlfriend kicked me out of the flat_.’

‘What? Was she trying to sofa-surf at yours or what?’

'She offered to "housesit" during our honeymoon, but we declined,' Charlotte said, and burst into laughter. 'Ah, well, there you go, Elisabeth. You should be proud of yourself, I’m sure this would have never happened without your little intervention.’

‘Hmmm...’ said Elisabeth vaguely. She was in full intellectual agreement with Charlotte that she should be proud of herself, yes, but sadly she was far too disorientated to enjoy the full karmic justice of the moment. 

‘So anyway what’s up, Elisabeth? To what do I owe the pleasure?’

If she knew Charlotte, there would be loud shrieking on the other end of the line within seconds of the word kiss. She braced herself and spat it out, and true to form Charlotte soon drowned her with her cries:

‘What?! Elisabeth, oh Jesus Christ almighty, you poor poor thing! You alright? What possessed him?’

‘Hang on, what do you mean: what possessed him?’

‘OK, I didn’t mean that last bit. That was just the shock. Of course who wouldn’t want to kiss you? Naturally. But you’ve got to admit that coming from him it’s a wee bit surprising, right? Are you OK?’

‘Well that’s the thing. See, and please don’t make too much fun of me, OK? You see, taken within the wider context of the fact that we spent a large part of Saturday night flirting shamelessly with each other, him kissing me on Sunday morning wasn’t all that shocking.’

‘What?!’

Elisabeth had fully expected Charlotte to cry as loudly as she just had, but she’d also rather hoped she would laugh her head off. Sadly, Charlotte’s legendary peals of laughter failed to materialise.

‘Look, I know, it sounds bad. I mean we both got a bit silly on Saturday, you know how it is, when it gets late and too much booze and... I thought, well I mean I thought at the time it was just a bit of harmless fun, I don’t know...’

‘Hell, Elisabeth, at this point I don’t know either. Do try and make some sense, will you?’

‘Then this morning he comes out and says he’s wanted to kiss me for ages.’

‘What?!’

‘I know: right? But I mean why would he say that?’

‘True.’

‘So he’s wanted to kiss me for however long but now you know what, now he’s just really glad he’s had a punt - his words exactly- and he’s enjoyed it tremendously, but he knows when he’s not wanted and hey, ho, it’s a shame but let’s just move on. I mean he’s just acting like absolutely nothing is the matter again!’

‘Aha.’

Aha? If Elisabeth had been after another dose of cool indifference then she wouldn’t have called Charlotte, of all people. Seriously, was “Aha” the best she could come up with? Also since when had kissing her, Elisabeth Bennet, become such a non-event the world over? 

‘OK, Charlie, explain “Aha” to me,’ said Elisabeth, trying hard not to sound as vexed as she felt. 

‘Aha,’ Charlotte said more slowly, ‘as in I don’t get what the problem is. Now the rumours are true, you have actually kissed him. Well done you by the way, I’m officially impressed! You got one over those dreadful girls on the Data Team, game over. He moves on, you move on, everybody moves on: perfect!’

‘Perfect?’ 

‘Let me get this straight,’ Charlotte started again, dropping her girlie exclamation marks, ‘On the one hand we have Will, who’s been into you for ages but is busy pretending not to care, and on the other we have Elisabeth, who’s not the least bit interested of course, except that she’s calling me at what must be 7 in the morning where you are, and over-analysing it in the most incoherent fashion. Assuming you’re calling to ask for my opinion, honey, I’d say just go with it. Have fun, you have my blessing.’

‘Charlotte, are you mad?’

‘Excuse me, what’s the problem here? Is he too handsome or too rich for you, or are those macchiatos really getting to you?’

‘Oh, shut up!’

‘Methinks you really do protest too much, hon.’

‘I’m never going out with him, Charlotte. Ne-ver.’

‘And why not?’

‘For starters, I’m just not prepared to give him the satisfaction... oh stop laughing, I’m serious. The guy’s never had to try for anything in his rosy life. He just always gets everything he wants, served up on a plate.’

‘And?’

 _‘_ Everyone fancies him, I’m not prepared to jump onto the bandwagon it’s.... it’s common, it’s unoriginal.’

‘Jesus, Elisabeth, how old are you, six? I mean don’t get me wrong it’s cute that you’re contrary and everything but really, that’s the worst reason I’ve ever heard for...’

‘OK how about this then? We work together, he’s off-limits, period.’

‘Is this in the company handbook?’

‘I have no idea but it’s in the Elisabeth Bennet handbook. Jesus, Charlie, do you know how long it’s taken me to be taken half seriously in this place? Do you want me to end up like Sarah Atkinson?’

‘What, behind the reception desk? Dear Lord no, save the bank from that, Elisabeth!’ Charlotte said, laughing again.

‘No, I was referring to the fact that the guys call her the office bike because she gets off with a different “co-worker” at every office function. So yeah I’m sure she’s had more fun than me at those, over the years, but now what do you reckon her career prospects are, with a rep like that?’

‘I really don’t see how this applies to you, Elisabeth. You’ve already got a successful career, you’ve got Paul reporting to you, Raj loves you. So if as it turns out Will also fancies the pants off you then for goodness’ sake just go with it! You’ll be fine!’

‘No, Charlotte. No way. I’m just his latest weird crush, it would never go anywhere, and meanwhile I’ll have to sit next to the guy day in day out, whatever happens. Plus, I’m a VP and Will’s an MD but even were it not the case, it still seems to me that a woman’s always got a lot more to lose in these scenarios. It’s a terrible idea, Charlie, I’m sorry: I’ve already wasted my stupidity quota on Tom for the year. Will’s off-limits, that’s it.’

‘Hmmm OK, fair enough. I see what the problem is now.’

‘Thanks, Charlie, I knew you would.’

‘The problem is it was a fantastic snog, wasn’t it?’

‘I… technically I think it was still just a kiss.’

‘Trust you to get technical: if it feels like a snog I’m sorry but it’s still a snog, hon, tongues or not.’

‘If... if you say so.’

‘No, dear, I think you were just saying so. Well good luck with the denial then - or would admitting to denial constitute a failure of denial, so that you’d have to deny that too?’

‘That last one, yes,’ said Elisabeth, smiling bitterly. Whoever had decided that bottle blondes were thick clearly hadn’t met Charlotte Williams, nee Lucas. 

‘Oh, darling! Cheer up, you’re doing the right thing, and it sounds to me like you’ve just had the perfect ego-boost!’

‘Ego boost?’

‘Keep visualising a jealous Market Data girl.’

‘Thanks for that image.’

‘There you go! And going by what you’ve told me of him, well, until today that is, I’m sure he’ll have no trouble carrying on and playing it cool.’

‘He is very good like that.’

‘It sounds like he’s very good in a lot of ways.’

‘Oh, stop it!’

‘I will, actually. Haven’t you got any work to do, cos I’m getting a bit hot and I rather think I need another cocktail?’

‘Oh poor you, enjoy!’

‘Love you too! Bye!’

Charlotte was right: if Will had any trouble carrying on playing it cool he hid it very well. He was perhaps a little quiet, a little silent on the cab to Deutsche’s offices and back, but the coffee rounds carried on as normal for the rest of the week. Then, very conveniently, the bank whisked him away to California for the yearly MD off-site and Elisabeth was spared the trouble of having to act cool back. 

Charlotte was right on another count too: to admit denial would have been a failure of denial. So in Will’s absence Elisabeth made sure that she did not beat herself up over missing her morning macchiatos. Why wouldn’t she, and why wouldn’t she miss Will being around to shut Andy up as, over the course of the week, he grew louder and more obnoxious? These were natural reactions, the product of a healthy aversion for weak coffee and strong language, sentiments which in no way compromised her standards of professionalism. 

Meanwhile Tom was making his absence harder to ignore. Letters arrived from him daily and she spent many tortured and unproductive hours wondering whether to open each one. It was tempting, terribly tempting to rip those envelopes and read on for a fresh slice of Tom’s stout heart, but what good could that bring? Whatever those letters said he was writing them from Oxford, which meant that he still hadn’t extricated himself from his drug-fuelled, cross-generational, bisexual love triangle. And that, Elisabeth reminded herself daily, was the only point his letters made with any material relevance to her present situation. 

Oh but if only Ben would stop playing the “Zab a zab zab” tune! If only she wouldn’t think of Tom every time she gazed out into the garden through the French windows. Eventually she would pull herself together again, and bury another envelope unopened under five years’ worth of payslips and bank statements, down the very bottom of her bottom-most drawer. 

Thankfully, Charlotte was right about one more thing: Will’s “punt” had indeed given Elisabeth a much-needed ego boost. Not, as Charlotte had assumed, because Will was so universally fanciable: to derive pleasure from that would have implied sharing a crush with those silly girls in the Market Data team, and Elisabeth still could not countenance the idea. So although it was far less to her credit she preferred to believe that what she’d enjoyed was merely paying forward onto Will part of the pain and humiliation she’d suffered at Tom’s hands. 

And hell, if Fitswilliam Kingsley Darcy could take his with good grace then so would she. To start with she would go out and plant some dahlias. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just realised I got my weeks wrong in yesterday's notes: you'll be getting two chapters each next weekend and the one after, then the bonus chapter. Sorry about that!
> 
> copyright 2021 Mel Liffragh, all rights reserved.


	24. Flagrant lice

'Hey,' was all that Will said when he popped her next macchiato onto her desk. Cool as a cucumber, as usual.

Save for the fact that he'd run into work before showering and then gone back out for the coffees. Even under the flat light of the ceiling neon strips there was still a glow to the skin of his face and neck.

'Hey. Thanks, so how was it?' Elisabeth asked, grateful for her coffee and, by implication, for Will's return to London, in a strictly healthy and professional way.

'Oh fine, usual bullshit, you didn't miss anything,' he replied casually, and just as casually she took her eyes away from the lingering glow of Will's skin, the better to prise the lid off her coffee cup. After a week without, it smelt heavenly.

'Nor did you, really,' she replied with a happy pout and a shake of the head, and turned back to her screens.

Well, there you go: easy, no awkwardness at all! Good job she hadn't wasted any time worrying about Will's return because it was fine, just fine. In fact if she had wasted any time worrying about it she would now have had grounds to feel mightily relieved. But of course she hadn't, and it just so happened that she was in a great mood this morning, so great that not even Pointless Poynton's latest email could take the smile off her face, though it announced yet another slew of weekend server migrations, and associated Continuity Testing.

It must be the coffee. She took a sip, hot and delicious, and started entering the migration dates in her diary and Paul's.

'It's good to be back, Elisabeth,' she heard.

Why did that wipe the smile from her face? Within the same action-packed microsecond she also blushed, cleared her throat, and stole what she hoped to be a discreet glance to her left. This fleeting glance was enough to make both her face and her blood freeze, and she gave him the look she'd last shot at Caroline at Charlotte's wedding. Then for good measure she crossed her arms in front of her chest and instead of replying that it was good to have him back too, which had been her innocent and strictly professional thought not 30 seconds ago, she said:

'Good for you, Will,' with an icy voice, a petulant shake of her head and the same obsequious and blatantly phoney smile she'd given him on the reception's sofa the day of his job interview.

And then just in case he still didn't get the message, just in case the cattishness and the ever-so-subtle body language were lost on him she also stood up and walked off, though not without dramatically chucking her half-drunk cup of perfectly good coffee into the bin as she stormed past him into the atrium.

That look on his face: seriously, what was he so pleased to be back about? How dare he sport that smile at 7:14am on a cold grey Monday morning late February? So OK, perhaps she was over-reacting, but she knew that smile of his by now and it couldn't be good, because if he was half as pleased to see her as he looked then she must nip it in the bud this time.

Right now, before she found herself inadvertently kissing him again.

Whereas if, on the other hand, his being this happy had nothing to do with seeing her again after a week, if he was so completely over his weird crush for her already that it had nothing to do with her whatsoever, then he deserved her ire all the more, the smug bastard.

Having established such a balanced, well-grounded rational basis for her outburst as she stomped across the atrium, Elisabeth realised she had no idea where she was going. She turned right a reception and went to wash her hands.

'You OK, Elisabeth?' Will asked as she sat down again. He was looking and sounding normal again.

'Fine, thanks,' she replied, hugely relieved that she was, indeed, all of sudden feeling perfectly fine again.

Weird.

Back to work then. Shame about that wasted coffee.

What followed was that strangest of beasts, a quiet Monday, so quiet that Newbie got sent out for ice creams around three o'clock, and not very much trading went on after that. Elisabeth bunked off discreetly right after five, and felt thoroughly pleased, for once, to be stepping down to her front door before six o'clock.

A jeans and reefer-jacket clad heap was waiting for her at the bottom of the stairs, announced by the smoke of a rollie. Elisabeth's face stiffened as she took in Tom's. He'd always been slim, she liked that in a man, but now he'd gone well past sinewy. His face looked drawn, but his eye lit up with the old spark as soon as it caught hers and he was still quick as a cat. He was up on his feet before she'd made it to the bottom of the stairs, smiling his old smile and reaching for a kiss. Much to her surprise she leant forward confidently, and made sure she got him on what was left of his cheek before he got her anywhere else.

'Elisabeth.'

'Hey, Tom! 'you waiting for Ben?'

'No I'm waiting for you.'

'I see.'

'I'm back. I'm back from Oxford. I left.'

'I see,' she lied, and felt her stomach tighten as she opened the front door. He dropped his rucksack against the back of the sofa and turned back to look at her. She stared at the bag and remembered a similar scene many moons ago, and how innocently happy she had been then.

'Shall we go out then? Can I take you out?' he asked, turning to face her, and making her look up from his battered backpack. Other than the stone of flesh he'd left behind in Oxford he was the old Tom through and through, but gone sadly was the old Elisabeth's insouciance. Where she had once struggled to take her eyes off him she was now struggling to keep looking at him, and she couldn't figure out whether that was because of how he looked, of how much he'd hurt her, or of what she still felt for him.

Or of what she might no longer do.

Or of what she might or might not feel for somebody else.

That last bit didn't bear thinking about:

'I'll go anywhere,' she said by way of a cop out, 'just provided you promise me to eat a square meal. Is that a deal?'

'I'll eat whatever you tell me, ma'am, promise. Where are we going?'

'I dunno, give me a sec, will you? Let me go and get changed.'

'Can I watch?'

'No, you can't,' she smiled, 'Then I dunno, just head to the Thai?'

Well, she thought as she pulled up her jeans, he was here now. He'd done what she'd asked. He looked like hell, but then judging by the one letter she'd opened from him he had actually been through hell. There was no telling where the next conversation was going to lead, but she wasn't willing to risk Ben or Mac walking in in the middle of it. So out they went before either of her flatmates came in. He tried to take her hand on the other side of the road but she shrunk back and away from him.

'No, Tom.'

'Naughty!' he said, slapping his hand with the other one.

'Thai OK, then?'

'Whatever you'll have me eat, ma'am.'

'Great, let's get you fed!' she said, holding the door for him. Her good cheer was entirely fake, and having spent weeks beating herself up over how easily she'd been taken in by his charm, she now found herself wishing she could fall back under his spell just for a moment. How sweet that delirium of fulfilled expectations had been when she'd found him in her bed on New Year, that warmth irradiating through her until she'd seen...

But here they were now, back to just the two of them, though somehow she had the completely irrational feeling that Will might be here somewhere too, watching them with his bad-market-day face on. Will and perhaps Charlotte and Jane too, willing her not to be silly this time. Was she ready for this? Absolutely not.

'How are you feeling?' she asked once they'd sat down.

'Weird.'

'Well, what else is new? But seriously, what have you lost, like, a stone or what?'

He shrugged.

'Should we talk about it?' she asked.

'Sure.'

'Well?'

'Well, you read the letters...'

'I... I read the first one.'

'Why just the first one?'

'Novelty?' she said trying for irony, but he saw through her bravado.

'No, come on, Little Miss Well-Adjusted,' he said, and now the look in his eye reminded her of the Tom she'd met that first night in Oxford, 'Why don't you tell me why you didn't open the others?'

'Well, rather a lot happened, actually.'

'Really, like what? Things too busy at the millinery for you to spare a moment for me while I'm languishing away on your orders? Market conditions got in the way?'

'Oh come on, Tom…'

'No, no, do tell me, what?' he asked, and now she was thrown right back to their first meeting: to that split second when he'd shouted that he wanted to kill her.

'I knew you'd come back when you were ready, that's all.'

'Still. You could have opened them.'

'I…'

'You?'

'Tom, if you think I get some strange kind of kick out of reading how miserable and out of your mind you and Sara get out there, then you're wrong! I'm not that pissed off with you. Never was.'

x

She felt better for it on the spot, but soon she looked back on her words and realised they had come out all wrong. Again. It had always been infuriatingly difficult to have any serious or even sensible personal conversation with Tom, but was she actually angry with him? Not really, not anymore. She'd had enough of anger, it was exhausting and she was tired of it. She wanted to hang on to the happy times, to the carefree Elisabeth who smiled at moonlit lawns, not to the angry Elisabeth who snapped at well-meaning people when they brought her macchiatos in the morning and smiled and said that they were glad to be back.

'I'm sorry, Tom **,** ' she sighed. 'I thought it was a… it was a beautiful letter but you've got to understand it was … disturbing. Can you see that?'

'Elisabeth, let me tell you what's really, but really disturbing. You keep telling me that I don't open up and that I never told you how I felt. So I go away and think about it. A lot. Then I write it all down for you and you don't read it. What's more: you can't even tell me why you won't read it.'

His voice was calm, even friendly, his face scarily calm. He had a very good point, so good that she wasn't sure how to address it. All she knew was that the tension between them was becoming palpable, until a pretty waitress took them back to happier times. All with four little words:

'You leady to owdah?'

'Al we leady to owdah?' Tom asked Elisabeth with his old mischievous smile, and at long last she found herself slipping back into a smile too.

'I'm just gonna have the green curry.'

'Chickin bif oh plawn?' the waitress asked.

'Sorry?'

'Chicken, beef or prawn, dear?' Tom translated.

'Prawn, please.'

'Yes, I'll have the plawn gleen curly too,' Tom said calmly. 'Is that OK?' he checked with Elisabeth, who had quite forgotten about supervising his feeding.

'What lice do you like, Suh?'

'What lice do you offah?' Tom asked, very cruelly in Elisabeth's opinion, but it was all she could do not to chuckle. The waitress bent down with a straight back to take a look at the menu.

'Sixty-one steam lice, sixty-two is flaglant lice. We have coconut lice also, vely nice.'

'Oh, darling, what do you think? What should I have?' Tom asked.

'I'll just have mine plain, Tom. You do what you like.'

'What was sixty-two again?' he asked the waitress, and bit his lip in eager anticipation.

'Flaglant lice?'

'Flagrant lice? Is that vely nice?'

'Vely nice, yes, Suh.'

'Then I think I'm gonna try that.'

'Thank you, Suh. Anything to dlink?'

'Jasmine tea, two,' Elisabeth cut in before Tom could try anything funny with the drinks menu.

'Tom!' she said once the waitress was gone.

'What?'

'That was unnecessary, wasn't it?'

'No, not at all, it was great! How many times have I been to a Thai, and I've never had flagrant lice. It's gonna be great! See, I'm so glad to be back already. We have the best fun!'

And there was Thomas Reilly in a nutshell: existential angst one minute, some childish prank the next. Oh but then, she had missed the childish pranks.

'Anyway,' he started again. 'You were about to tell me all about how the stag-flation in the zloty's under the counter markets prevented you from reading my letters.'

'Ah yes, that.'

Damn. Elisabeth stared at her white ceramic plate, while the waitress came back with a pot of tea and two cups. Tom beamed his friendliest smile at her while she poured, and she smiled gracefully back and bowed before she went.

'I'm listening,' he said.

Elisabeth looked at him and sighed. Her stomach tightened as she prepared to be honest with him and, more importantly, with herself.

'I chickened out. I didn't feel up to it.'

Tom nodded. With his legs crossed one way and his arms the other he looked sort of wonky, twisted, like some underfed yogi caught in a crazy trance, a trance which might be broken should he take his eyes off her, ever. She stared back at him and started fiddling with her hair.

'Why did you chicken out?' he asked.

'Why?' she sighed, 'That's a very good question. Let's see. I'll admit: part of me could stay up all night reading over and over again about how you love me so, Tom. I know, because I have. Perhaps it's just because I'm as vain as the next person, but I probably still do hold some irrational feelings for you. And you write beautifully, I'll give you that. A girl doesn't get that sort of mail very often.'

Her opening ad-lib had wiped any remaining traces of cockiness off his face. She paused to look at him, then carried on while she still felt the courage:

'Then, Tom, there's this guy with the dope habit and that strange fascination for bi-sexual manic-depressive artists, or at least the one bi-sexual manic-depressive artist, and I can't figure out whether he's writing the letters, or whether that other fun flirty and altogether very charming guy is. But whoever's writing, the real issue is: I'm not even sure either of these guys likes me, you see. It almost reads like you begrudge me for disrupting your life, or something. I mean, you've made it abundantly clear how much you generally disapprove of horrible venal City people like me. Yet you say you want me and I'm not sure why. You definitely don't seem at all sure why. Why, Tom?'

'Can't be helped,' he shrugged. 'Doesn't really sound like you like me very much either, by the way.'

She sighed. Fair point. Then what on earth were they doing here?

'I'm sorry, Tom. I didn't mean to… I do still like you. But you're right, deep down I don't think I should, either. I mean honestly right now you look like death served up cold. You're a homeless, jobless, drifting dope-head and that doesn't exactly make for compelling relationship material in most girls' books, trust fund notwithstanding.'

She said it kindly, and he took it that way and smiled, and she had another realisation:

'You know, Tom, pointer for another time, but a girl deserves to be kissed sober, you know. In full daylight, now and again. Did you ever wonder why we never did that?'

'Yeah yeah… wait, what do you mean: pointer for another time? Are you breaking up with me?'

She laughed:

'What?'

'Is that it? You tell me to go away and think, I go away and think. I write to you, I come back and you've just ditched me?'

'I'm sorry, Tom, what?'

The mad and still-quite-scary stare from Oxford again.

'Tom, if that makes you feel better about it then yes, OK, let's say that I'm ditching you tonight. But in my book you ditched me on January first. Your choice, your timing, your decision. Forgive me for trying to get on with my life.'

'But I lo…, '

'Tom I know, but you don't like me and never will. It'll never happen, end of. It's better that way.'

The silence that followed was awkward, but not that awkward for Elisabeth that she didn't pack away half her delicious prawn green curry. After a few mouthfuls she even felt some of the self-satisfaction one feels upon completion of a long put-off chore, a really awkward bit of filing. Thomas Wickham Lorcan George Reilly, finally consigned to drawer B for: Bygones Be Bygones.

Tom meanwhile was elegantly swilling his chopsticks around his bowl, making his prawns swim around in the sauce. She was ladling some more onto her rice when he said:

'So I take it you're still snogging this guy from your office then?'

'What?'

''s OK, Ben told me.'

'For a man of such few words Ben has a real issue with information leakage…'

'Are you?'

'It wasn't a snog,' she said, hoping a passing blush might be put down to the curry's heat, 'it was just a kiss, and I'm pretty sure it was a one-off.'

'Poor guy, after he drove you home to bloody Archway and everything?'

'Yeah well, look, off-sites are weird events. People under the influence of intense boredom will go and do weird out of character things, which we've both been quite clear aren't going to be repeated. Must have been some weird crush or something.'

'Has anyone ever had a regular, bog-standard crush on you?'

'I don't know, Tom. I don't care.'

It was true, she didn't. Right now she didn't care why Tom or Will might or might not like her, all she wanted was an easy life, and to finish this curry.

'Why aren't you eating?' she asked.

'Not hungry.'

'You really ought to try and beef up and clean up, you know. Sometimes things actually make more sense sober and fed. Talking of which, what happened in Oxford?'

'I don't know...'

He frowned down at his plate:

'I got fed up. I just got up one morning and that was it. I went to see her and told her I was done, I was going.'

He paused, took a deep breath, and looked up: 'She didn't take it very well, but finally, you know, I was pleased with myself, because she cried and screamed and scratched and kicked, and it didn't get to me. I thought it might, still, but it didn't.'

A bit like you're not getting to me now, Elisabeth thought smugly.

'So I got back to Bombshell's and started packing up again, then there was a call from Vera saying she was on her way to A&E and she hoped I was pleased with myself.'

'Oh dear…'

He shrugged:

'I'm not. I'm not pleased with myself at all. But Sara's the one who's got to deal with herself. Not me. I told Vera: she's not my problem, or even yours, she's her own problem. She should try and deal with it. She called me a callous git.'

'Sorry.'

'Not your problem either,' he sighed.

Elisabeth sighed too. Yes, she thought as she spooned the last of the curry onto her plate and gestured at the waitress for the bill. I must remember that, Tom: you're not mine to fix, however much you'd like me to.

Tom was much feted on their return to the flat. She left him in Ben and Mac's capable hands and retired to her room, and the next morning she found a note under her door. It said:

_I'm going to go off to dad's to try beefing up and cleaning up, as suggested. I'll be safest there, the whole estate has been largely drugs-free since 1995, when our old head gardener retired and the new one told Dad it wasn't really hemp plants I'd been keeping in the greenhouse since my biology O'level coursework. Hope you don't mind, I've borrowed your Dostoyevsky for company. I'm not sure if you want me to call you so ask Ben and Mac for dad's number if you do. I do._

_Love_

_Tom_

Her Dostoyevsky? God, good luck to him. She'd never got past page thirty.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> copyright 2021 Mel Liffragh, all rights reserved.


	25. Plausible deniability

They were all staring at Sarah Atkinson's bum as she strutted back to reception across the atrium, having just delivered the desk's mail. Even Elisabeth was, and even Paul, because Sarah had been going steady with some guy in Asset Allocation since the Christmas party, and like all happily paired-off women she was putting weight on.

But unlike any other happily paired-off woman she didn't seem to be putting on a tummy or thunder-thighs, no, just more, more and more of her lovely bum and boobs. Her clothes had always been tight but they were now at bursting point. It was impossible not to stare.

'Elisabeth, 3.11 please,' Will interrupted, and it turned out that rather than ogling Sarah he had been opening his mail all along. Elisabeth could tell by the stiff, freshly opened envelope in his hand, which he held onto as he stood up.

'Right, yes, 'course.'

She grabbed her notepad and followed him.

Her heart sank as soon as he closed the meeting room door. He was smiling at her.

'Will, stop it.'

'What?'

But he did stop it, because he did know perfectly well what he was doing because, with the possible exception of that stone-cold-sober, full-daylight, not-quite-snog on her doorstep, Will always did know perfectly well what he was up to. Just now he'd been smiling at her in a non-collegial manner and he knew it, she knew it, and they both knew that she did not like it one bit because he'd done that a couple of times since he'd been back from the States and she thought she'd made it abundantly clear it wasn't on.

Right now, for instance, she had her arms crossed one way, her legs crossed the other way, she was giving him as much of a death stare as she'd ever given anyone, and she was tapping her right toes in the air in a can-we-please-move-this-along fashion.

And, whatever he thought, she was hating this catty, petulant attitude of hers at least as much as she was hating him.

'OK, Elisabeth, great news,' he said, producing two gilt-edged cards from the envelope he'd just opened. 'You and I are going to see those little yobs from TSF next Saturday.'

'The Soul Factory? That's not great news, Will, that's my idea of hell.'

OK, so she didn't have Will down as a manufactured boy-band groupie, and his enthusiasm for this outing was indeed baffling, but there might have been more humorous ways to make that point. Elisabeth thought back, almost fondly, to the early days of their acquaintance. To Will's Vulcan death-stare and how simple things had been once.

He started smiling again, so she said, or rather spat:

'Seriously, Will, give me one good reason to do this.'

Will put the invites down onto the coffee table between them, and after a moment he looked up again, and finally started handling himself like the guy she neither loved to hate, nor hated to have liked quite so much, once, on her doorstep.

'OK, Elisabeth, reason one: considering we've not sent any business their way for four months it's great news that Rheinland are inviting us, not just good news. This is an olive branch that we need to take as much as they need to hand it over. This ban's costing us too, you know.'

'I realise that, Will, but I still fail to see why it should make me want to listen to TSF for two hours.'

'OK, then let me put this to you in a way you will understand: what's six mil divided by 150?'

'Forty grand, why?'

'I guess you've been too busy with tradePad to do much arsing about on Bloomberg lately, so let me catch you up on the goss down Broker Strasse. What's happening here is that last year Deutsche's rumoured to have paid Robbie William 5 mil to sing at their New Year shindig. Now Rheinland are looking to pay TSF even more, so they can one up the other Germans. They're hosting 150 bankers in some small West End club for media-types,' he said with evident disdain for the profession, 'and it's all the market's talking about. So these invites are not to be sneezed at, Elisabeth. Not even by you.'

He said it kindly, not snootily as he would have once, but thankfully he didn't say it un-collegially either.

Funny, Elisabeth thought. For one night's work those "little yobs" from TSF would each be taking home some good investment-banking-sized packages. They wouldn't be boasting about it, for sure, when they next posed chest-waxed for the front cover of _Sweet Tweenies_ magazine. Their PR team would probably make them donate half their fee to Great Ormond Street Hospital but even so, how come it was cool for the four of them to earn shedloads from Rheinland, but the same fact made Rheinland's CEO a hateful bastard? She reached for the cards on the table: stiff white gilt-edged named invites, golden tickets indeed, one of which said Elisabeth Bennet.

As much as she despised herself for it she had to admit that that Will was right: that piece of paper with her name on it felt pretty amazing. Another ego-boost, Charlotte would say. Jane would call it an opportunity she should be proud of, and perhaps Elisabeth would have seen it that way too, if it hadn't also involved a night out with TSF – and with Will.

As if reading her mind he started relaying with a healthy dose of irony Raj's explicit instructions for both of them to go and "re-ignite the business relationship", "maintain the bank's profile in the industry" and "showcase our unique scientific trading approach". He was, in other words, making it crystal clear that taking her along was Raj's idea and not his, concluding with:

'You coming then?'

'Sure.'

Sure, yes. It would be fine. The show might even be a giggle in a so-cheesy-they're-good kind of way. Fascinating too, as an anthropological survey of 40 grand a head events.

'Great, you want me to pick you up?'

'What, NO!'

Damn, so close. Maybe next time she could demur without actually shouting at him. But hey, at least he wasn't smiling, right? Or indeed driving her anywhere and then kissing her.

'Look, this is black-tie, Elisabeth, Raj will kill me if you get mugged on the way from that dump where you live.'

'Fine, I'll take a cab.'

'Fine.'

'Great,' she lied, got up, and left the room.

'So the boss is taking you to TSF?' Neil asked in a rare quiet moment later that day.

'Aha, apparently so,'

'God you're lucky!'

Elisabeth frowned. First of all Will wasn't taking her, she'd got her own named invite. No doubt at Raj's insistence, but it was recognition of her services to electronic trading so no, she wasn't being taken, thank you very much. And second of all, she'd never had Neil down either, as an excitable follower of manufactured boybands.

Then she remembered that, in the pointlessly competitive world of trading, even the opportunity to take part in a pig-manure-shovelling contest would be seen as desirable, provided that it was a forty-grand-a-ticket pig-manure-shovelling contest, held in a small West End club for media types.

'I guess,' she said in the end.

'Jesus, Elisabeth, it wouldn't kill you to show a little enthusiasm.'

'Sorry, yes, of course! Great ticket, yes, I'm really glad to be going.'

'You don't look it.'

'Just tired but tell me, is it true Robbie Williams played for Deutsche Bank for five mil?'

'Oh yes, at least that's what they said. Andy went.'

'I see… I never realised that's how all these glamorous pop lives are funded.'

'Yep, nicking our bonuses, they are!' Neil smiled, but she'd already let out another sigh at the prospect of the TSF gig.

'What's wrong?'

'Nothing, nothing, anyway tell me, how's things with that lovely girl from the off-site? Whatsherface, Natasha?'

Thankfully only Elisabeth could see the link between the two lines of conversation, namely the awkward fallout from all that mindless off-site flirting.

'Funny you should ask, I might just have asked her out,' Neil said, making sure to keep his poker face on. Elisabeth made up for it by breaking into the first genuine smile she felt she'd cracked all day.

'Wey hey! Well done you, Neil! And might she have said yes?'

'Might have,' Neil said, still playing it cool.

'Well, well, well… Good for you!'

'Do you know a good place for a first date? Can't take her anywhere too flashy, you know, keep it low key. Somewhere sort of French perhaps, I think she said she'd spent a year there.'

'Define "sort of French" to me: there's this place in Islington… where do you want to go? I don't know many places south of the river.'

'Ah, probably south, actually. I think she said she lives in Clapham.'

'I see, sorry.'

'If it's a nice evening I'd stay along the river,' Will said from behind her.

'Yes, that'd be lovely.'

Something made her turn, and she saw Will raise an amused eyebrow at her, his lips twitching into an almost smile, which instantly wiped hers away. Seriously, what part of "quit doing this" was still unclear to him? She tucked her hair back and looked back at Neil:

'Yes, that or just take her to Paris, that's sort of French and south of the river, isn't it?'

The next day a letter arrived from Wiltshire, which she had to decide whether to open or not. She ended up throwing it, still unopened, in the first bin on her way to the tube as she headed to Vincent and Jane's for the weekend. Jane had just been allowed to come home, finally, and although still on bed rest she was now able to enjoy her family's company. Her return home also meant that for the first time since New Year Elisabeth would get to spend a bit of time with her brother, rather than looking after either his wife or his children while he looked after either his children or his wife.

Elisabeth planned to put the time to good use: she couldn't get the bank to introduce a women quota on its board, but perhaps she'd be able to turn Vincent into a New Man and a supportive husband. It was a long shot, but she had never let that stop her before: just think of the tradePad launch.

'Vincent, I never asked you: how do you feel about Jane quitting her job?' she said as he helped her set the table for Sunday lunch. She had tried her best not to let her own opinion on the matter show and, as it turned out, she might have managed only too well:

'Honestly, that's the best decision she's ever made,' said Vincent. He stopped helping, the better to focus on expressing his views: 'It's going to be such a relief for her, not having to run herself silly the way she's been doing. And then she can be there for the kids, you know, as she should...'

Elisabeth stopped him with one glance.

'As she wants to be!' he hastily corrected himself, and fussed over a plate before continuing, this time addressing the cutlery drawer. 'After all, we're lucky that we don't need her salary. Perhaps I should feel smug because I'm the one who suggested it to her in the first place but you know what? It doesn't matter who thought of it first. All that matters is that she's making the right decision.'

'I hadn't realised it was your idea,' Elisabeth said. She had also failed to twig when her own working mother's son had somehow turned into the fatuous chauvinistic pig now standing in front of her. New Man, Vincent? It really was a very long shot:

'Oh yes, it's just too hard, you know,' he was saying, 'for two parents to carry on working like this. How many couples do you know who can manage with two jobs like ours? How many?'

'No, you're right, I don't,' Elisabeth said with a sigh. Soon thanks to him she would know none at all, because this kitchen clearly was too small for both his stupid ego, and his wife's career.

'But aren't you worried she might get a bit bored after a while?' she asked after a heroic struggle to stay calm.

'Naaah, there'll be other mums, you know, clubs, coffee mornings, those sorts of things,' Vincent said. Now that the conversation had strayed away from his area of expertise he was setting the table in earnest again.

'I'll go and help Jane down,' Elisabeth said, rather than punching him.

Once upstairs Elisabeth did not kid herself that Jane was delighted to see her _per se_. Jane was delighted that she was going to be taken downstairs for a few hours and allowed to sit with her family, rather than lie down here on her own.

'Thanks,' she said as Elisabeth helped her stand up. Almost seven months pregnant she was still light as a feather, and despite her recent ordeals still far too proud not to resent even Elisabeth's helping hand. Elisabeth understood this and even respected it, but she worried when after only a few steps she saw Jane wince.

'You OK?'

'Fine, fine,' Jane said, getting on with her slow but deliberate shuffle out of the room. 'I just wish he wouldn't scream at them like this.'

'Right.'

Indeed Vincent had just been heard downstairs calling the children to dinner. The children shouted back, one of them coughed, then a couple of doors slammed and Jane winced again before starting her descent of the staircase, one hand on Elisabeth's arm and the other under her bump. They covered the full distance to the kitchen in barely five minutes and Jane, having levered herself down onto one of the brown leather dining chairs, caught her breath and looked upon the two beautiful blond heads running in towards her.

'Vincent, where are their slippers?' the delighted mother said as her progeny rushed towards her.

'Go easy on Mummy,' Vincent replied in his deepest _pater familias_ voice, whilst transferring a mid-market white Burgundy from its bottle into a decanter. The children ignored him, just as he had ignored his wife's question, which Jane asked again in an already less delighted tone.

'Vincent, darling, their slippers? You need to put their slippers on or they'll never get rid of that cough.'

'Hmmm? Kids, go and find your slippers, allez allez' he said impatiently while stirring his Blanquette de Veau. Whatever else you might say about him, Vincent was a true son of France, one of those accomplished and fussy cooks who ply every last kitchen utensil to the confection of a single dish, and then abandon them exactly where they've stopped using them.

Sophie left to do as she'd been told while Dan stole another cuddle from his mum and eventually had to be shooed away from her lap. More shouting and coughing was heard from the playroom while Vincent stood by the counter, stirring away, unaware of his wife's winces each time the children shouted.

'Vince, why don't you go and help them look? I'll stir,' Elisabeth said to him.

Vincent took off with a look of sufferance, and now stampeding as well as shouts were heard up and down the stairs.

'If you knew how hard it is for me to sit here,' Jane said in a small voice.

'I know, I know, but it's good for them to get on without you sometimes, trust me.'

Vincent and the children eventually reappeared into the kitchen fully shod.

'How on earth do these things end up in the laundry basket?' he grumbled as he sat down.

'You mean you know where the laundry basket is?' Elisabeth said, ''cos I couldn't tell by the state of the floor upstairs round your side of the bed.'

Vincent shot her a dark look. Jane briefly laughed in her sleeve, then not at all. Vincent served up and they enjoyed a typical family meal, i.e. a stressful one where many a cup of water almost fell to the floor and no adult sentence was heard through to completion, and then Jane and her children were seen out into the playroom while Vincent and Elisabeth cleared the kitchen.

'Vincent, Vincent darling?'

Elisabeth heard Jane first and popped her head around the playroom door.

'What's up, Jane?'

'Can you ask him for the scissors?' Jane said. Dan was on her lap again, which they both knew he wasn't supposed to until his baby sister arrived. On his own lap Dan held open a Thomas the Tank Engine magazine. Elisabeth was delighted to see Jane breaking the rules for once in her life, and for such a worthy cause too.

'Right up,' she said then, back in the kitchen: 'Vince, les ciseaux?'

Vincent waited until a self-important man was finished talking on Radio 4 and then pointed to a drawer. She opened it, rifled around, did not find any scissors, looked around the counter tops and in the dishwasher.

'Vince, they're not here, where are they?'

He shrugged.

'Sorry, not in the kitchen,' Elisabeth said to Jane, 'Any idea where they might be?' she asked, starting to examine the contents of the playroom cupboards.

'Can you go and get Vincent?'

'Sure.'

She returned with her brother, though not before a different self-important man was done talking on Radio 4.

'Vincent, darling, where are the scissors?' Jane asked.

'I was clearing the kitchen,' Vincent said.

Elisabeth recoiled in anticipation of a full-blown marital.

'Darling, how can you not know where the scissors are?'

'I don't, there! But I'm sure the au-pair put them somewhere sensible.'

'If she did, then how come you can't find them?'

'Why should I know? They could be anywhere!' Vincent protested with a petulant flick of the kitchen towel over his shoulder.

'Owwww!' Jane said. Once again it wasn't pain, thank goodness, just exasperation, but coming from her even a very short "Ow!" was roughly equivalent to several "you effing Peel Hunt"s back on the desk.

As even her inobservant husband should have known, except that he still didn't:

'Look, just calm down, OK? Do some colouring or something with him and I'll go and buy you some new scissors right after I'm done clearing up the kitchen, alright?' he said as if his wife was the one who needed indulging with cutting, pasting and colouring.

Instead of highlighting this to him, as Elisabeth would have done, Jane spoke back in the tone she normally used to cajole Dan into brushing his teeth:

'Vincent, if neither of us knows where the scissors are then they could be anywhere, and they are dangerous things. Do you want Dan to cut another blanket for his trains, perhaps out of your office curtains this time?'

Dan's eyes lit up and Elisabeth had to repress a chuckle. She loved Dan's creative spirit. Vince and Jane should be so proud. But now was not the time to compliment them on their son's engineering promise, she could tell. Vincent looked darkly from Elisabeth back to his wife. Time to separate them:

'I'll look for the scissors, you finish in the kitchen,' Elisabeth said to him. 'I'll start with the laundry basket, shall I?'

Jane smiled, Vincent vanished in a huff, and five minutes later Sophie ran to find her upstairs, lisping with excitement:

'Auntie, Auntie, I 'member! Daddy took the scissors! He took them! Because he lost them!'

Elisabeth looked down at her niece, confused. The damn thing with three year olds: in Teletubby world this sort of inversed causality probably made perfect sense, but to her it was deeply disturbing.

'Right, never mind, Sophie, he took them _where_?' she said, squatting to get level with her niece.

'To the cwicket,' Sophie answered with a solemn nod.

'The what?'

'The cwicket!'

'The cricket?' Elisabeth checked, in case Cwicket was some other children TV nonsense she'd never heard of.

'The cwicket. Where he works.'

'Ooooh, you mean the office!' said Elisabeth, springing back up, 'OK come on, Sophe, let's go get them!'

'Jesus, thank goodness she's gone,' Vincent muttered, less New Man than ever, once his wife was back in her bed and the children parked in front of the telly, 'See what an absolute nightmare she is? God, I can't wait for that kid to pop.'

'Hey, I'm pretty sure she can't wait either,' Elisabeth said, but looking at her brother's drawn face she was surprised to discover that she hadn't spent quite all her reserves of sympathy on his wife. Vincent was having a hard time too, albeit on his own, more favourable male terms.

'I'm sorry, Vince, this has been tough for both of you.'

He nodded into his coffee, she tucked her hair back, and then she surprised herself all over again. Out of this unexpected sympathy for her brother rose a beautiful idea, one which might possibly save Jane's career:

'She's really no fun when she's like this, is she?' Elisabeth said, mimicking Vincent's casual contempt as best she could.

'Tell me about it!'

'Let's face it she's never been terribly good at being stuck at home, has she? Remember her last maternity leave? Remember that time you used the wrong marigolds to wash up the bottles?'

'Oh no! Don't remind me, I'd forgotten that one!' Vincent said, looking up from his cup of coffee with the first smile she'd seen on him all weekend.

'How could you have forgotten?'

'How could I?'

'Oh but don't worry, she won't let you forget this time around.'

His chuckle tapered into a sigh, and she kept going while she was on a winner:

'God, Jane? Stay at home mum? Can you imagine, when she's spent the whole week looking for scissors and slippers and disinfecting the washing up gloves? Good luck with that, Vince, sucks to be you.'

Vincent sighed again, shaking his head.

'I mean let's face it, she's far less grief when she's working. She gets far too knackered after all the operas and the footie games to give you aggro over the laundry.'

'You're right!'

Vincent greeted this discovery with wide-eyed, head-shaking wonder. She recognised it as the same astonishment which seized the worst of the old boys back at the office when, every so often, she left them with no option but to acknowledge that the girl quant actually knew what she was talking about. But never mind that, for now she must focus on the job at hand, and strike while she still had the advantage of surprise over Vincent:

'Perhaps you should find her one of those mother's helps, you know, or a housekeeper or something,' Elisabeth said, careful to sound casual and even slightly dismissive about it, as if talking about something she didn't care much about, one way or the other. To sound the way Neil or Will would sound when buying a couple of mil's worth of Xstrata. Sure enough Vincent pricked up his ear:

'Just some dog's body, to keep everything in the right place around here, full time. You know,' she said, as if it had just occurred to her, as indeed it had: 'I think Charlotte's cousin's got one of those.'

'Really?'

No, not really. None of Charlotte's cousins had husbands, let alone kids, let alone housekeepers. How long could she keep the bullshit up? She pictured a Reuters screen and a dealerboard and gave it her best shot:

'Said it literally saved her marriage, she did. At Charlotte's wedding, I remember,' she said, and mentally checked: three-link chain, still plausibly deniable, keep calm and carry on:

'Just think about it: Jane stays out all day, then she comes home to find everything where it should be. She'll be sweet as pie, won't she?'

Vincent was now pouting and nodding to himself.

'And as you said,' Elisabeth continued, 'you don't really need her salary anyway, so it might as well go to keeping someone else off the dole, right?'

'That's not a bad idea, how do I find one of those... what do you call them?'

'Mother's helps?'

God, the sheer injustice of it, they were his kids too, weren't they? What would a father's help do for a living? Stir blanquette? Decant wine?

'Shall we go on the net?'

'No, no, no, wait!' Elisabeth said, holding on to his arm with the greatest and phoniest concern: 'Whatever you do don't do it without consulting her first.'

'Right, OK. Why, d'you think she won't want to?'

God, Will was right, sometimes bluffing was almost too easy:

'Well, she seems quite determined to quit, you know, you'll need to talk a good game,' she said, and bit her tongue to stop herself from smiling.

'Right,'

'Try and make it sound like you're supporting her though, you know, not like you want to get rid of her. Just... just act like the New Man!'

'The New Man?' Vincent laughed, 'Seriously, you girls don't go in for that crap, do you? You know it's all bullshit, right?'

'Of course, just being ironic,' Elisabeth said, making sure to smile as if she really was. 'Anyway tell me, does Jane have to go back for a while in order to keep hold of her maternity money?'

'I think so, six months?'

'Great! You could suggest it as a trial period: try and find someone some time before she has to go back, make sure they're well trained, and then evaluate at the end of the six months.'

'Definitely.'

There was no hope for Vincent as a New Man, this much was clear. But maybe Elisabeth would manage to get the Old Boy to support his wife instead. He had that man-with-a-new-dial-up-modem-and-a-mission look, and she reckoned that now Vincent had changed his tune Jane probably would too, if only to keep the peace. Finally she was able to go and bid her good bye, and she climbed upstairs with a spring in her step.

'Hey, Jane, bye bye, I'm off!'

'Already?'

'Work tomorrow.'

'Of course, too bad: dinner on Saturday though, right?'

Elisabeth froze. She'd managed to forget all about Saturday night. The whole time she'd been busy buttering Vincent up it hadn't even lurked at the back of her mind, though it had almost continuously ever since she'd left room 3.11 a week ago.

'What's wrong?' Jane asked.

'I... I've got to go to this fancy black-tie broker thing with Will on Saturday night.'

'Hurray, a date! He's asked you out properly at laaaast!' Jane cried, clasping her hands with heart-breaking enthusiasm.

'No, no, Jane, it absolutely is not a date. It's just a work think that Raj wants us to do together.'

'Really? Oh what a waste, Elisabeth – I thought you liked him! Are you sure it's not a date?'

'I do like him, but Jane I'm on two ex-boyfriends in six months already and whatever is going on with us lately, it's not healthy and I need to make it stop, not go on a date with the guy.'

'Why, what is going on?'

'Hell, I wish I knew, but the way I look at it either he's only 99.99% over his weird crush, or more likely it was all off-site boredom induced and he's so totally over it that he actually has fun messing with me in 3.11. Which sadly isn't very difficult.'

'Hmmm.'

'I know, it's not big, it's not clever and it's not professional, Jane. You don't need to tell me: I wish I could make it stop. I do try to.'

Jane looked at her first with a frown, then with pinched lips, then looked down at the bedcover and back up again. Elisabeth braced herself for the chiding she knew she deserved, but instead Jane said:

'Well to my mind, you might as well make the best of a bad job, Elisabeth. Whatever is or isn't going on, go and have some posh civilised fun for once in your life: what are you wearing?'

'I guess my…'

'No,' Jane cut in. 'You can't go in that second-hand thing you always wear at Christmas parties.'

'But it's lovely!' Elisabeth said, disappointed but also slightly panicked. Black vintage 1960s raw silk: she had to do better than that?

'It suits you, but it's too short for a black-tie do, Elisabeth. Go over to the wardrobe. I might have something for you.'

'You? You must be kidding. What are you, a size 6?'

'Not when I'm trying to hide a 16 weeks bump second time around, I'm not. I had to get something for that client evening at the Royal Albert Hall and ended up with a 10.'

Elisabeth let out an unladylike snort as she shook her head with envy: 16 weeks pregnant Jane was still a full size smaller than she was.

'That's very kind of you, Jane, but I'm more of a 12.'

'Never! Not with all that swimming you've been doing since the New Year. Go on, open it!' she said, pointing at the wardrobe. Elisabeth complied, though only out of deference for her friend's condition.

'There, on the left, no, next to it, black satin. Yes, that one!'

Elisabeth pulled out your average little black number, except indeed perhaps not that little in comparison to the rest of Jane's clothes. Halter neck though not in a tarty way, low but still decent at the back, in thick soft shiny cloth. A nice cut too, with a tailored waist and little pleats gathered high up behind the legs, giving it what was going to be a figure hugging line.

'It looks about the right length,' she said dubiously, holding the hanger to her chest. 'How on earth did you wear that?'

'On me it was mid-calf, which worked with heels. Try it on!'

'Don't be daft.'

She did, mostly on the basis that it would be quicker than to argue with Jane, and was amazed how easily the zip came up despite the size 10 designer label stitched into the side seam. She took a tentative tiptoe towards Jane's mirror, where Jane caught her reflection's eye.

'So tell me, Elisabeth, do you still feel like his weird crush?'

'Perhaps not.'

Swivelling on the ball of her feet to check her back, and despite the purest of intentions to the contrary, Elisabeth couldn't help wonder what effect this black-satin-shrink-wrapped derriere might have on Will, and whether that might pay him back for his last few unprofessional smiles in 3.11.

But then, she thought, landing back onto her heels with a thud and a sigh, she had made it so abundantly clear that she didn't want Will to get over familiar with her, or indeed with her derriere: what could possibly be the point of this frippery?

'You're going to need some proper shoes to go with that,' Jane said with a frown reminiscent of Sophie's.

'I have proper…'

'No, not those. This dress needs at least four inches.'

'This dress has needs?'

'Don't even dream of not going shopping for this, Elisabeth, OK? I'll call you until you do, and I will find out if you don't, you know that I will. Four inches or above: you're lucky, Will's more than tall enough for you plus four inches.'

Elisabeth frowned.

'…but you don't have to listen to me, of course,' Jane said while nonchalantly swishing her ponytail over her shoulder, 'I'm just trying to save you from yet another _faux pas_ , but if you want to turn up to a forty grand a head do looking like you're scared of your own gorgeous legs, that's up to you.'

Something told Elisabeth she was being subjected to the kind of reverse psychology she'd only just used on her brother. She didn't want to fall for it, yet she also didn't want to turn up at a forty grand a head do looking scared of her own legs. Which she wasn't, she was scared shitless of making Will smile at her, not the same thing at all:

'I don't know, Jane, don't you think this already looks like trying too hard?'

'Who cares? I thought it wasn't a date.'

'True.'

'Which is a shame, because you certainly look stunning.'

'Thank you, Jane.'

'And you do deserve to be taken on a proper date.'

'Well, one day, maybe,' Elisabeth sighed again, then remembered that she wasn't the one with real problems in this room. 'Thanks for the dress,' she said with a smile which was not entirely forced. 'I'll go shoe shopping, promise.'

'Good. And you will tell me all about it over Sunday lunch, right?'

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> copyright 2021 Mel Liffragh, all rights reserved.


	26. The done thing

She stepped out of the cab and saw the venue ahead of her. Or rather, she saw a clump of penguin suits hanging by the entrance, took a deep breath and clutched at the book in her coat pocket for reassurance. She'd not been able to read on the way over, she'd been too busy fretting pointlessly, but it was good to know it was there in case she needed to pretend she wasn't fretting pointlessly. She could only hope Will was not going to carry on tonight the way he had all week, smiling at the smallest provocation. It was exhausting getting cross with him ten times a day. Jesus, even the Data Team had never raised her blood pressure at that kind of frequency. And yet Elisabeth couldn't help fear that tonight might be even worse.

But now that she was here and, thanks to Jane, dressed for it, she felt surprisingly calm. It probably helped that Will didn't smile when she picked him out of the crowd and he recognised her. He froze for a split second, and if anything he stepped back rather than forward, and then stood poker straight with his shoulders thrown back, his hands in the pockets of a coat she'd never seen on him before, but which looked even better than his usual one.

From a distance he reminded her of the Fitzwilliam Kingsley-Darcy of their first, ill-fated encounter by the lift: as perfectly tall and inapproachable as K2 in winter. Then, as she got closer, she recognised Will who looked like Will, only Will on a very good night. He didn't move until she'd walked right up to him, and then he leant in to kiss her on both cheeks. 

x

They kept it a stiff and rather formal greeting, hence Elisabeth found herself growing more relaxed around him than she had in ages. She even took a moment to remember how lovely Will smelt up close, before they pulled back and he looked at her again, stone faced.

'Come on then,' he said, and before Elisabeth knew it she was inside, standing beside him in the queue for the cloakroom and, hang on a minute, holding on to his arm at the elbow. How had that happened? She let go and frowned back at the few steps they'd gone down through the narrow doorway.

But she wasn't angry with him and, more strangely still, she wasn't kicking herself over it either. It was a wonderful feeling, which she could only put down to Jane's dress. Perhaps when you put on someone else's clothes you also borrowed a bit of their personality. So while she'd never feel as small and pretty as Jane, Elisabeth did feel a bit of what it must be like to be her. Poised. Ready and able to deal with stuff, situations, with people, even. Then as they waited on in silence she thought with a fleeting smile: what if the reason Charlotte dressed so loud was only so she could deal with her even louder clients? Conversely would she stop speaking in exclamation marks if she were made to wear jeans and Elisabeth's ancient black pea-coat?

Her smile vanished at the thought of that coat: it was letting the side down, and rather than stuff its pockets she really should have left her book back home, and brought instead the little clutch Jane had lent her, but which presently lay discarded on the carpet of her bedroom. At least she had, thank goodness, listened to Jane on the shoe front because, Jesus, she was right, even the girls manning the cloakroom looked like supermodels tonight, with their teeny tiny little black dresses, vertiginous heels and cheerless pouts. Their productivity was in direct proportion with the practicality of their outfits, so no wonder there was a bit of a line.

Elisabeth took her coat off and then watched Will do the same. Then she watched him watch her, black-tied and tongue-tied. She couldn't be sure why he was taking so long over it – probably just the shock of seeing her in something as nice as Jane's dress – but she too was finding it really hard not to stare, what with him looking so, well, good.

She tucked her hair back, tore her eyes away from him, and returned to looking at the backs queuing in front of them. Two more couples walked away from the coat check, the women shimmering like precious stones, and wearing them too.

'You keeping this?' Will asked when they got near the front of the line. He was pointing at Jane's black pashmina, which she'd added to her outfit at the last minute in a half-hearted attempt at both warmth and modesty.

'I don't know.'

What would Jane do? What was the done thing? None of the women seemed to be wearing anything on top of their beautiful dresses. Meanwhile all the blokes were wearing jackets so logically one of the sides must be out of their comfort zone, temperature-wise. Elisabeth assumed it would be the ladies, if only because they were in a roughly one to four minority:

'I think I'll keep it.'

'Naaa, don't,' he said, flicking it off her shoulders, and handed everything over to the lady behind the counter, leaving Elisabeth to shiver, stunned into compliance in the sudden draft.

OK then. The coatroom girl, a _cum laude_ graduate of the Sarah Atkinson School of Charm, shot her a contemptuous look as Elisabeth rubbed the goose bumps off her bare arms. Then, with a professional smile, she handed Will a numbered token. They walked on down the stairs, where they were welcomed by a middle-aged man carrying a tray of drinks:

'Champagne, orange juice, buck fizz?'

'Do you have any soda water?'

This seemed to take the man by surprise. He must have operated in transmit-only mode thus far because she had to repeat her question. Perhaps soda water was not the done thing either?

'But certainly ma'am, if you'd like to make your way to the bar,' the waiter bowed, and gestured behind him with a humble turned up palm, all the while keeping his massive tray balanced. By now there was a queue forming behind them on the staircase.

'Come on then,' Will said, and started cutting a way through the crowd. A few paces on she found herself running her thumb against surprisingly smooth skin and realised he'd grabbed her hand. Then before she could work out how she felt about it they came to an unexpected halt halfway to the bar and bumping into him she recognised, again, the smell his jacket had carried at the Christmas party. She forced her attention onto the cause of the blockage.

'…how are you?'

'Fine, yes, how about you?' said Will.

'Yes, great! Will you introduce me to the young lady?' asked a freakishly tall greying gentleman. She felt her hand drop out of Will's, and he cleared his throat before turning to her:

'Elisabeth, this is Nigel Hawthorne, Nigel is now with Nomura, but he used to be my sales guy at Beaumont's long long time ago, back when he worked for Peel Hunt.'

Elisabeth raised an eyebrow with faked interest and bit her lip. She knew by the look in his eye that Will had mentioned Peel Hunt in as an in-joke.

'Nigel,' he said, 'this is Elisabeth Bennet, who's running our new electronic trading platform.'

'Oh,' Nigel said with a look of annoyed confusion on his face. 'But I thought you guys moved off paper tickets ages ago?'

'We did, but we've just gone FIX and real time,' Will explained with an impatient look towards the bar, then checked on Elisabeth again. With Nigel she was in far more familiar territory than with pashminas and coat-tailed waiters, and was able to put on a passable impression of professional interest:

'Whatever do you need real time for?' Nigel asked, 'Anyway, what's become of our friend Christopher since he retired?'

'I hear his handicap is coming down.'

'Can't wait to play him again,' Nigel said, and was probably about to carry on but Will cleared his throat again.

'It's really nice to see you again, Nigel. But we'd better get this young lady here a drink before it all starts, hadn't we?'

'Nice to meet you!' Nigel and Elisabeth said in insincere unison, then Will took her hand once more, and this time they completed their journey to the bar without hindrance.

'Don't ever call me "young lady" to my face again,' she said when they got there, and prised her hand free. She saw his eyes darken, but only for a moment:

'Sorry, you mean you don't likebeing patronised by old toffs?'

'I do that professionally, thank you very much, but this was supposed to be my day off.'

x

She smiled as she said it, and so did he. Then he carried on smiling and she did too: hang on, how could this be happening? Elisabeth looked down but then she couldn't help but look up again: still smiling. It felt good, amazing even, such a relief, marred only by worrying how long they could possibly keep this up. Perhaps he did too:

'What are you having, now we're here?' he asked.

'Cranberry and soda? They should definitely have it.'

Behind the bar a myriad of brightly coloured bottles had been arranged against a mirrored wall and expertly lit, all surely more for aesthetic than for libatory purposes. Will relayed her order to an impassive barman who mixed their drinks with far more fuss than was necessary, occasionally interrupting himself to cast them a supercilious glance.

'You look lovely,' Will said while they waited.

'Good,' she said looking down to her new shoes and back up. Actually Jane was right, she was a teensy bit scared of her own legs in those. 'Thanks, so do you.'

'I look lovely?'

'Don't be pedantic, you get my gist.'

' _Tchin tchin_!'

'Cheers!'

They took a few sips in silent observation of each other. This Elisabeth was about to break when a plump little man with a vermillion cummerbund wrapped around his rotund belly relieved her of the task.

'Will!' he slapped the much taller man between the shoulder blades. 'Long time no see! How've ye been?'

'Good, yes, how 'bout you?'

'Great! How's life ? How's tricks?'

'Good, yes.'

'Christopher's gone though, isn't he?'

'That's right,' Will said with a nervous glance at Elisabeth. By now she felt comfortable enough not to bother faking an interest in this latest friend of Toad's, and just took another sip of her drink. Will turned back to the short man, who was now going on about various people working for various hedge funds, and she found herself looking forward to TSF. Even their singing had to be better than all this pointless name-dropping.

'And how's Raj.. Rajput? Rajminder? I could never remember his name' the little man said, shaking his balding head. 'Bit of a serious kinda guy, hey?'

'Rajeev,' Elisabeth cut in while still staring into the mid distance above his shoulder. He must have expected her to be seen but not heard because at that he looked around from Will to her in stunned silence.

'Most remiss of me,' Will said, uncrossing his arms: 'Bob, this is Elisabeth Bennet, who released tradePad for us on the desk. Elisabeth, this is Bob Petersen, we used to work together at Goldman.'

'Charmed,' he lied, raising a sweaty hand to shake hers.

'Pleased to meet you,' she lied back.

Their handshake killed the conversation stone dead.

'Are you still with Goldman?' she asked to try and breathe some life back into it, for politeness's sake rather than for her own let alone Will's.

'No, I moved on two years after Will,' he said, looking at her right ear. She in turn watched his hand as he compulsively rubbed his fingers across his thumb. He took a shallow breath and moved his gaze down to her shoes. If she hadn't come across his kind a million times before she might have wondered if she had broken out into some freaky wart rash, or grown a second head, or both. More likely he just had issues looking women in the eye, which was weird since he sounded more American than British public schoolboy. Maybe that was why he'd crossed the pond?

'I'll go and powder my nose!' she concluded with exaggerated exuberance and a glance first at the clock, then at Will.

'I'll be right here,' he said when she handed him her glass. She nodded and turned, and made her way to the ladies, faintly aware of his gaze following her. She heard conversational ease return between them as soon as her back was turned so she took her time, leisurely trying out the hand lotion and marvelling at the thick luxurious softness of the towels. A couple of gazelle-like women with small bones, smaller dresses and elaborate woman-made curls were checking their makeup and casting each other competitive looks. Judging by their age and dress sense these were second-generation arm candy, so until they'd locked in a deal they needed to take the game extremely seriously. The first generation, represented to Elisabeth's left by a fifty-something clothes horse with a gaunt face and a dark red, expertly draped mid-calf dress, easily had the upper hand in terms of jewellery, elegance and practised social confidence, if no longer in terms of looks. Neither category would see any great threat in big-boned, under-groomed Elisabeth.

She was out of her depth here, this much was obvious, but Elisabeth also knew that without Jane's help it could have been a lot worse. Besides, as Charlotte was wont to say the only difference between fear and excitement is breathing, and she was still breathing just fine. Upon checking she also found that she still wasn't pissed off with anyone: not with Will, not with herself, not even really with Nigel from Nomura or with Bob Petersen or with any of the pretty young ladies not so discreetly comparing themselves against her in the mirror, and coming out on top.

She would have indulged them a little longer but it was about time to get back to it, so Elisabeth pushed back the little sparkly slide she'd stuck behind her left ear to keep herself from fiddling with her hair, and as a token gesture towards accessorising. She was still breathing and smiling, so all that left was for her to draw her shoulders back stand tall and walk back out again.

'Anyway, better go!' Bob Petersen said when he saw her approach. 'Lovely to meet you, Elisabeth,' he added, looking somewhere around her knees.

'And you, Bob!' she replied with a firm handshake and a firmer gaze, then sighed: 'What a wan...'

'Sorry,' Will said, looking as contrite as she'd ever seen him. 'You OK?'

'Sure!' she shrugged, and took her glass back from him.

'You look great.'

'Thank you, you said.'

It was the kind of thing she would have spat back at him yesterday in the office but tonight, here and dressed to the nines Elisabeth said it instead with only a hint of a blush.

'True,' he nodded, and kindly took his eyes off her.

'Is Bob a friend of yours then?'

'No!'

'Oh good. How's Dean by the way?'

'He's fine. He says hi.'

'That's nice of him. He's a nice guy.'

'Glad you think so.'

'Of course.'

Conversation dried up again. Perhaps it was her after all, she thought, remembering her effect on hateful little Bob Petersen.

'What did he do?'

'Who, Dean?'

'No Bob, at Goldman?'

'Head of equities, why?'

'He was your Toad then?'

'More of a Pig but yes,' Will said and she smiled, but then sighed again:

'Scary thought: did any women manage to stay and work there?'

'Oh yes, it's only the pretty ones he can't deal with. Want another drink?'

She looked up at him – perhaps he was right and this wasn't the time or place to discuss the effect of pigs and toads on gender diversity in the financial workplace.

Funny how it never seemed to be a good time or place for that.

But hey, here she was, at a forty grand a head do, all under her own name so yes, why not get another drink?

'Sure,' she said, 'let's get a drink and then try and get somewhere near the stage before it all starts?'

'Same again?'

'Yes please.'

He ordered, while she stared at a short, squat middle-aged woman squeezed into an indifferent grey dress. She didn't look like anyone's Plus One either. She was talking excitedly to a bunch of penguin suits, and despite her utter lack of physical attractions they all seemed to be listening. Listening to her, not to her ample chest. And from what Elisabeth could hear they were talking, the woman was talking, about the dot com bubble and the Euro, and being utterly serious about it. Part of Elisabeth longed for the day the guys at the office would listen to her like this too. Meanwhile another vain, shallow part of her hoped that she wouldn't have to grow that old and matronly first.

'Come on, let's go,' Will said, grabbing her hand again. This time she felt him squeeze it a little tighter, but she didn't mind. Right now his hand felt more comfortable than either her shoes or her dress, the former a bit too high and the latter a bit too narrow at the knees for her to keep up with Will's long stride as he cut through the crowd, greeting a few more people along the way. She hung on as best as she could until he stopped near the small stage and stood next to her, still holding her hand. On four inches of heels she was almost level with him.

'You nearly had my arm out,' she said, more to break the silence than because any serious harm had been done. This might have been taken as a hint for him to let go of her hand, but instead he stared back at her and gave it another squeeze:

'Sorry. 'you OK?'

Well, yes, she must be fine, judging by the fact that her thumb was already busy rubbing the back of his again. Which was very nice, so very nice in fact, that she couldn't persuade her own hand to let go of his though that, surely, would have been the done thing.

She kept silent, and as the lights went down she thought he moved a little closer to her. TSF were introduced, the curtain went up to loud cheers and an opening string section resounded across the room. A drummer started to tchakatchak and four youths appeared in white hoodies and matching trousers worn halfway down their matching underwear. On the fourth tchakatchak they started kicking up, their heads switched into a synchronised funky chicken and the cheesiness of it all at once became utterly unbearable.

Elisabeth started smiling a huge embarrassed smile, which had nothing to do with the fact that Will's fingers had just then woven themselves between hers – that somehow felt perfectly natural.

No, she was cringing at the cheesiness of the white-boy-proto-R'n'B booming from the stage. Oh, and the sight of a couple of hundred ungainly middle-aged men trying to boogey in their suits wasn't helping either.

Oh dear, giggles - not the done thing at all. By now the sound levels left room only for non-verbal communication and it was clear looking at her, that although Elisabeth was finally having fun, it wasn't the sort of fun that Rheinland expected to see in the front rows at forty grand a head. Thankfully TSF were far too absorbed in trying to impersonate the Jackson Four to pay attention to their audience and as for Will, he too looked amused, though whether by the band or by her reaction to it she could not tell. He took a finger off the rim of his glass and raised it to his lips. When this failed to do anything but exacerbate Elisabeth's hilarity he changed his hand hold, put his drink down, took a step back and a quarter turn, and with a nod of encouragement he sent her into a twirl.

Having splashed what was left of her cranberry and soda onto the floor Elisabeth clung on to his hand and bowed to put the empty glass down. She let the years of practice take over: you don't spend three years studying with _le tout Paris_ without picking up a few essential life skills along the way.

Soon she found that focusing on her steps rather than on TSF did the trick. Will wasn't a spectacular dance partner, by any means. He belonged to that school of men who only dance with their eyes and their arms but he knew the basic moves and executed them willingly enough. Which was about as much of a claim to dancing as Elisabeth could lay for herself. Besides, unlike with most of her dance partners back in Paris, Will's height left her enough clearance to twirl without having to stoop, and she had sufficient experience of the alternative to be grateful.

She was now enjoying herself in a more acceptable way. The giggling subsided, and she concentrated on following him whenever he tried something she couldn't remember. More than once she bumped into people and turned to apologise, happily oblivious to Will's gaze following her with equal measures of concentration, pride and joy.

In this pleasant fashion they enjoyed a couple more bouncy numbers, before the shortest member of The Soul Factory positioned himself centre stage and solemnly announced a cover of Robbie Williams's "Angel". How apt, given the whole idea was to one-up his Deutsche show. Will and Elisabeth silently agreed that this wasn't the occasion for cheek to cheek slow dancing, as a few more _bona fide_ couples had started doing. Instead Will let go of her hand so they could turn and attend to TSF's over-harmonised, over-vibratoed _a capella_ rendition. To Elisabeth's intense relief this turned out to be the last number of the first set. The lights went on and they started to look around them.

' 'you having a good time?'

'I am!' she smiled. 'I'm having a great time. I had no idea you danced. I didn't think British guys did.'

'I don't.'

'Well, I don't really either but you know what I mean: there's fun in trying, isn't there?'

'There definitely is, yes. With you.'

She raised a hand to her mouth again:

'I'm really sorry about the giggles by the way,' she said, took a deep breath and got a precarious hold over the returning hilarity. 'I'm sorry. Quants, can't take us anywhere, can you?'

'No, believe me it's great to see you happy.'

'I'm really sorry about that. Oh dear, we might just have to have some more terrible dancing if they carry on like that in the second half.'

'I'm game.'

'Oh good.'

'More drinks?'

'Can you face this crowd?'

'For the sake of your cranberry juice? Definitely,' he said, and grabbed a hold of her hand again. This time they made it about three yards in the direction of the bar before being stopped:

'Pill, I catch you at lazd! Hove are you?'

'Fine, fine!' he said, firming his hold on her hand. Elisabeth looked away to contain a fresh fit of the giggles. This evening kept baffling her expectations, in many good ways but, in this case, in some majorly bad ones too. This time the guy was about her height, early forties, with short mousy blonde hair and the most enormous, the most spectacular pouty lips. He reminded her, in an unpleasant way, of a skinny younger Toad, only crossed with a goldfish and with the added attraction of a comedy German accent.

'Hafing a kood time, I zee!' the man continued in a high pitched voice and with a proprietorial air which, combined with his accent, made her guess he must be a Rheinland man.

'Thanks, absolutely!' Will concurred with a polite nod.

'Kood!' he slapped Will on the back, then turned to Elisabeth with a jovial smile. She took on as demure an air as she could muster in the circumstances.

'Szo von't you introduze me to ze lucky lady?'

Will winced and gave her hand another squeeze before replying.

'Elisabeth, this is Jens Langewand.'

Jens Langewand? Not Jens Gro **β** enLippen? No no, wait: Jens VonFlippingGoldfish, surely?

'Jens is Head of Sales at Rheinland,' Will explained, which hit Elisabeth like a bucketful of ice-water, instantly neutralising her penchant for cross-linguistic schoolgirl puns. This was Jens of "Neil, give me Jens's direct line, I'll take this in 3.11." fame. This was the man for whose sake they were here.

Will seemed to realise this just as she did and let go of her hand. Though she hadn't thought it possible she found she begun to dislike Jens Langewand even more.

'Jens, this is Elisabeth Bennet, she joined us from research last summer to run tradePad.'

'I zee! And are you enjoying it on ze dezk?' he asked her, 'Are zese kuyz behafing zemzelves for you, ha ha?'

'Yes, and no… I mean I do, but they certainly don't,' she said, stifling a sigh.

'Zo you must vörk vor zis chappie, Paul Dellanoo?' Jens carried on, unfazed as he simultaneously demoted her and butchered Paul's surname.

'Paul De-la-no-é,' she corrected him. 'He works for me, yes.'

OK, how much more of a hole could Jens dig for himself? Oh but wait: he could!

'I ssee. He's a kood guy, pbut isn't he a pbit…'

'French!' Will cut in. 'I know – taking over the place, aren't they? Look, Jens, it's great to catch up with you. I'm sorry but we really need to get Elisabeth here a drink. Please excuse us. Call me on Monday, great do!'

Jens nodded, and with that the Rheinland ban was officially over. Elisabeth wondered fleetingly whether the man's obnoxiousness might have been deliberate, a ploy to hasten the negotiations. Will nodded back at Jens and then he pulled her away again, taking off in the direction they'd just come from. At first she didn't question it, only too glad to feel his hand around hers again, and to put any distance between herself and Jens. Will was probably just trying to circumvent the crowd instead of cutting through it and if this reduced the risk of bumping into further patronising gits then she was with him all the way.

But when they cleared the crowd on the other side of the room he made a bee line for the stairs, climbed them two at a time while still dragging her along, and with his free hand started rifling his pockets before slamming his plastic token onto the cloakroom's countertop.

'What the…?'

'114, please,' he said, and threw a couple of coins into the tips bowl with such rage, they clinked as they rolled around for a while before settling down.

'Will, what are you doing? I thought we were getting a drink?'

Instead of answering he carried on death-staring the coat lady while squeezing the blood out of Elisabeth's fingers. Her garrotted fingertips started throbbing while with his free hand he flicked his remaining change in his trouser pockets.

'Will, are you OK?'

This was not something she'd often had cause to worry about. You just didn't worry about Will, he was tautologically fine. He was the man who daily kept his cool while handling Toads, Pigs, German brokers and half-French quants. He had form in pissing off and/or spooking half-French quants too, of course, but even when he did there was always a sense that he was in control, doing what he meant to be doing.

Not so now: while she continued to hope that some sense might eventually emerge out of Will's strange behaviour Elisabeth begun to suspect that the man now crushing her hand might not bear much relation to the one she thought she knew.

'Get your coat,' he said in a tone she was all too familiar with, yet none too keen on.

'I don't want to leave,' she said, and just about managed to pull her hand free.

'Too bad, our work here is done.'

Since she wasn't complying fast enough he grabbed both their things off the counter, tucked them under one arm, seized her hand again with no further attempt at delicacy, and yanked her still bare shouldered out and into the cold.

'Will, do you mind?'

She shook herself free again, freezing.

'There,' he said chucking her coat at her. She struggled with it until she realised the pashmina was what was blocking her sleeve, and this little comedy turn appeared to loosen Will up a fraction.

'Do we have to leave? I know it's cringey but I didn't want to. Plus don't we have to stay and network and stuff?' she said in a more conciliatory tone as she pulled her coat collar up around her scarf.

'Sorry.'

'There's another whole set to come. I fully agree it's faintly embarrassing, but you said you were game.'

'I'm not anymore.'

'You're not?'

'Changed my mind.'

'I see. Why?'

'Why?'

'Yes, why? It's a legitimate question.'

'Is it?'

'Yes!' she said, stamping her foot with exasperation. He shrugged and looked down. 'Why do we have to go, Will? You're not feeling unwell or anything?'

'No.'

He looked at her, smiled again, and then shook his head:

'No I'm not unwell, not at all.'

'Oh good,' she said, relieved. 'What's wrong then?'

Once again his smile vanished, and once again her mind boggled.

'You want to know what's wrong?'

'Yes!' she cried. By now she was not so much baffled by their sudden exit, as by this new frequency of Will's mood swings – most stock prices didn't tick up and down this fast.

'Yes – please,' she said more patiently, for it did pain her to see him like this.

'Elisabeth,'

He stopped again. He looked, and sounded, exasperated, the way he did when he was really pissed off with IT, say. She wasn't scared of him when he was really pissed off with IT, and she wasn't really scared of him when he was pissed off with her either. But she'd never had no idea why Will might be pissed off so bad, and if not downright scary that felt at the very least a bit worrying. It felt wrong, painfully so, and she would have done almost anything to make it stop not for her own sake, she realised, but actually for his.

'What is it, Will?'

She saw him take a deep breath and cross his arms, and braced herself for the worst as he locked her in his patented death-stare. She thought she'd done her best out there, what with Jane's dress and the heels and everything. She'd thought she'd pulled it off too, but maybe in hindsight she hadn't at all. Maybe it was the giggles – not the done thing, it's true, not at all. Oh blooming quants, you really can't take them anywhere…

'Look, Elisabeth, it's hard enough trying to flirt with you at the best of times but with these guys,' Will said, uncrossing his arms to point an accusatory thumb at the club's door behind him 'with these guys it's just beyond me, sorry.'

Whilst Elisabeth stopped breathing her eyes followed his hand, and saw that he was unwittingly pointing at a 20 stone bouncer a few yards behind them, who shot them a threatening look. So she pulled Will's forearm back down and stared wide-eyed and dizzy-headed at the point where the lapels of his coat met.

'I see,' she nodded, looking down in a daze, and felt his hand reach for hers.

'Do you?'

'I…' she mumbled as their fingers found each other.

'Oh, fuck it!' he said, dropping her hand again.

She looked up and attempted to ask "What?", only no sound came out, because his mouth was already on hers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> copyright 2021 Mel Liffragh, all rights reserved.


	27. Twenty years hence

His hands wrapped themselves around the back of her head, but he need not have held her so tight: she kissed him back very willingly indeed, and soon just as eagerly as he was kissing her.

They could have done this all night but he pulled back. Their heads brushed past each other's and hers settled on his shoulder. She stared into the mid-distance behind him and hung on for dear life. His heart was beating even harder than hers, she felt it through their several layers of winter clothing. She let her hand run over the back of his head, his neck, take an initial measure of his broad back.

'I'm not in trouble this time?' he whispered into the nape of her neck, his hands similarly exploring her. By way of answer she shook her head, rubbing it against his, and let her eyes close again. His hands travelled back to the sides of her head, peeled her away very slowly, then he held her face a few inches away from his:

'I'm sorry, Elisabeth, this must be the worst date you've ever been on.'

'No worries, I thought it was a work thing,' she smiled before a sudden, inexplicable surge of shyness made her look down.

He stared on at her and started tucking her hair back, one wild strand at a time:

'I guess technically yes, you're right,' he said, and peeking up she saw his face lit up by a broad, proud and devastatingly gorgeous smile, 'But then you made it perfectly clear you wouldn't go on a date with me, didn't you?'

He tried to look into her face, but with downcast eyes she carried on staring at the point where his clavicles probably met, and shook her head.

'I'm sorry, Will, I'm really sorry I've been such a …'

Oh but he was grinning for England, and looking back up at him and seeing him like this she started to blush, so he put her out of her misery and kissed her again, under the disapproving yet keen stare of the big bouncer, until their lips finally disengaged and their arms twined themselves around each other instead.

'You're OK?' he asked. He was tugging at the pashmina wrapped around her neck, his lips searching for a friendly place to rest, and eventually finding one behind her earlobe. She shut her eyes as tight as she could and then opened them again.

'Fine, thanks,' she whispered, lest speaking too loud should break the spell. He took her head up between his big hands again and got her to look at him:

'Really?'

'Yes, really!' she nodded, smiling through the remnants of this ridiculous, belated shyness.

'Brilliant. In that case, Elisabeth,' he said, letting go of her head now that she was looking at him, and grabbing her idle hands instead, 'let's take you on a date. May I take you on a proper date?'

'What…'

What's the point, she almost replied. But she stopped herself in time for once, and frowned at him, then at the ground: weren't they already, well, where people get to at the end of dates? Or at least towards the end of really really good ones.

'Look,' he said as if he'd read her mind, 'we don't want to look back twenty years hence and have this to remember for a first night out, do we?'

Unfortunately he was once again thumbing with oblivious rudeness at the huge bouncer behind him. So rather than taking him up on the even scarier "twenty year" thing she started by going up on tippy-toes to cast the bouncer an apologetic smile over Will's shoulder, grabbed a hold of his hand and slowly pulled it down.

And then, just in time, she remembered Jane's parting words. And why not? She did deserve to be taken on a proper date.

'Yes, Will. A proper date would be lovely,' she said, smiling as much to herself as to him. He was, understandably, a bit thrown by her return to full formal answers:

'You're sure about this, Elisabeth? With me? I'm not too thick for you or too… I've never been in a band and my French is rubbish.'

'If anything you might be a little too smooth but that's all, really. Are you sure I'm not too … I don't know plain or...'

'Plain?'

'I mean compared to…' she said, with a nod towards the club door and a thought for the perfect glittering specimens of womanhood behind it, 'Look, you might as well know this is the very best I can look. I've had help tonight, believe it or not.'

For a horrible moment she feared Will might agree with her, for instead of kissing her again he shot her the dreaded death-stare:

'OK, Elisabeth, you realise I've not sweated my gut out to ask you out tonight because you look pretty, right?'

Her face froze and her heart sank: suddenly she was 13 again, and the ugliest ugly duckling ever to waddle around the pond.

'Which you don't: you look gorgeous. I realise you try not to around the desk, but you still do,' he continued in the same exasperated tone.

That was better, but still Elisabeth felt compelled to hide some overhanging anxiety by smiling, which only upset Will all over again.

'I'm serious, Elisabeth! I'm fed up with pretending that this is all good casual fun. It's not, OK? This is hell for me. I fucking hate it, I hate sitting next to you all day, pretending to like you. I've bloody hated it from the time I walked into that bloody building and watched you... Oh Jesus, you do my head in, Elisabeth, you always have. You've no idea how many times I've all but chucked it in, no idea how hard it is for me sitting there all day, pretending I don't fantasise about us. It all but killed me, watching you email that two-timing wanker in Estonia every morning. I love you, Elisabeth. I do, I love you, deal with it. I've never met anyone remotely like you and I know full well I never will, so I haven't got the faintest interest in flirting with you, OK? I've tried but you know what, I do enough pretending all day without pretending with you as well. I love you. So if you're just after a bit of fun, or just after distracting yourself from Matey out in Estonia then tell me, please. Tell me now, while I can still fuck off with what's left of my dignity.'

'OK, please don't fuck off, Will, please don't.'

'You sure?'

She was, and she just could not conceive of him ever doubting it, though by the look on his face he still did. She did very much want to go out with him, yes, and not just because whatever he said he was, and would always be, miles out of her league in the gorgeousness stakes. No, she wanted to go out with him because she still had no idea why or indeed how Will put up with her half the time, but she knew that if he could love her at seven o'clock in the morning, if he could love her at the end of a day's programming, and if he could still love her after five and a bit months of watching her scoff lunch at her desk and drop crumbs and the occasional slop of mayo around her keyboard, then they had a better chance at happiness than most.

'I can't promise you twenty years time just yet, Will. I'd love to but knowing us both we'll probably have our moments. All I can promise you right now is that I'd really like to find out, is that OK?'

'It's fine,' he said, and kissed her again.

And that was the last she ever saw of the Kingsleyian death stare.

He took her to a restaurant a few streets away, which she thought at first was far too posh for her, until she remembered that she was for once in her life dressed for a posh date, and that Jane was right: posh dates could be great. An hour and a bit later on the pavement his parting peck on her lips turned into another lingering bout of hungry kissing. One of her hands wove its curious way underneath his undone dinner jacket, and started following the contours of his waist. All was irreproachably firm under her light, absent-minded touch. Her hand continued its journey around him until it found the small of his back and the groove where his spine ran. She ran her fingers up it for a second, and felt him tense up in one mighty shockwave rippling away from her hand. His lips left hers with a sharp intake of breath, and sought the refuge of her neck before breathing out again.

She slowly took her hand off him and a quiet smile rose on her lips. Never mind his flawless rower's physique: this was beautiful. Beautiful and priceless because it was hers, all hers and only hers. Venus herself never felt more blissfully powerful than Elisabeth Bennet did as she sent her hand forth again, this time fully aware of what she was doing.

'Elisabeth, Elisabeth hang on…' he panted, pushing her back.

'What?'

'You getting in, or not?' asked the cab driver.

Fair point. In their solipsistic bliss they'd forgotten all about him. She looked at the big dark void inside the cab, and sulked. No way she was leaving Will now, no no no. She couldn't stop now: she'd hardly scratched the surface. She absolutely must find out what else might happen to Will when she ran her hands on other parts of him.

'D'you want to come for a…'

'Love to.'

A what? Never mind, they got in and sat side by side, and smiled idiotically the whole way back to her flat.

So beguiled was Will that he didn't even notice Brenda when they got in. He and Elisabeth enjoyed another long kiss under her indifferent gaze before entering the lounge hand in hand, where they found Ben standing by the kettle. He turned around and ogled the two of them, his pale eyes and wide mouth even wider than usual.

'Hey there, Ben, so, this is Will,' she said to try and shake him out of it. Will was presently glued to her side, but went along with her effort at civility and even unglued himself for long enough to extend a hand to Ben.

'Will, this is my flatmate, Ben.'

'Hi,' they both said and shook hands, briefly and unsmilingly.

'Mac around?' she asked.

'Upstairs,' Ben replied, raising his eyebrows in the general direction of Mac's room with a long-suffering look. The American girlfriend had been staying over for almost a month now, and was fast taking over their kitchen with her vegan snacks and smelly herbal teas. She was also a frequent and thunderous lover. Elisabeth smiled and squeezed Will's hand for encouragement. He was beginning to relax, but poor Ben still looked shell-shocked.

She understood why a moment later, when someone stirred on the sofa, then got up. Only one thing for it:

'Will, this is Tom. Tom: Will.'

This time there was no awkward handshake, just a moment of leaden silence during which Tom got up and looked straight at Will. Will looked back at him and then down with one eyebrow quirked. Ben looked manically from one to the other. As for Elisabeth, she squeezed Will's hand tighter and tighter until Tom, of course, was the first to regain the use of speech:

'Will, Will… Will! Right! Yes, I think she might have mentioned you before. Way way back, last year. Back when I first met her, in fact.'

She winced.

'Great,' said Will, though he didn't look it.

'So you too, hey? But she is quick to enchant, is she not?' Tom said, looking at him with his wide lips curled up and the same half-crazed daggers in his eyes he'd shot her that first evening in Oxford. 'Had us all under her spell, I'm sure,' he said with a dramatic sweep of his long arm, 'the moment we met her, really. But mind that you love her well, Will: it turns out she is also peculiarly cruel in her revenge.'

Elisabeth's ears and cheeks were on fire. She stared at the dirty carpet for a second, unwittingly squeezing the life out of Will's hand. She heard him start:

'Look, Tom, I don't know what…'

'She?!' Elisabeth cut in, and gave Tom that narrowed-eyed, unblinking look that the Market Data Team had learnt to fear back at the office. 'Who exactly is she, Tom? Hmmm? Me? I'm right here!'

She saw Will look around at her, even more scared and confused than he had looked outside the club. It pained her to see him like this, yes, but for now she had to get on with this:

'Me, I have always been right here, and this, this has nothing to do with you, or with revenge, Tom. It's got to do with..'

Was she really going to say it? Hell yes, she was:

'It's all to do with love. Good, old fashioned, uncomplicated monogamous love. You wouldn't understand but I'm sure glad he gets it,' she concluded, rudely thumbing at Will, 'So now good night.'

Will having thus handsomely helped make her point she dragged him away again, out of the lounge and into her room.

'You OK, Elisabeth?'

'Are you? Did he scare you?'

'No but you scared me a bit, I think. Was he drunk or something?'

'Oh no... I mean it's pretty likely, yes, but he can do this sober too.'

'Jesus, Elisabeth, are all your first dates like this?'

'I'm sorry,' she said, kicked her shoes off and leant her exhausted forehead against his chest with a sigh.

'Come here,' he said, wrapped one arm around the whole of her and with his other hand started stroking the back of her head.

'It's so unfair,' she moaned to his lovely chest, 'I mean I can't even remember when I last had a first date, any kind of date in fact…'

He kissed the top of her head, squeezed her a little tighter, then pushed her back away with the most beautiful grin on his face:

'Really? Who's a lucky boy then!'

'Thanks.'

She kissed him and as ever with them the kiss took on a life of its own. They had to mark a brief interruption to take off his shoes and get down onto her futon. All Will now had to contend with was one hook behind her neck and a zip running down her back, one that started a little too low down to allow her to wear any kind of corsetry underneath.

By contrast, and in one of life's many injustices to womankind, she had over half a dozen of those absurd screw-on buttons barring access to his tantalising torso, and he'd done them so tight that she'd only just managed to get the first one undone, with his help. She felt his hand searching the neck strap of her dress, and as he got the hook out of its eye she let out a small gasp of mixed pride and apprehension. She hoped he would like what he found as much as she was enjoying what she could feel of him under his shirt, but despite all his previous reassurances she couldn't help worry that he might not. Then miraculously in the middle of all this fizziness and worry she experienced one of her always random moments of engineering brilliance: she yanked his shirt out of his trousers and got to an expanse of bare skin more beautiful than anything she could have imagined.

Judging by his sudden intake of breath, Will enjoyed the moment every bit as much as she did.

'I'm sorry, Elisabeth, it's not you,' he mumbled, and she realised that she had no idea how long it had been since they'd used their mouths to speak. But now not only was he breaking for a chat, he was pulling away from her just as her hand was beginning to get familiar with his absolutely perfect butt.

'It's not you, Elisabeth, I swear.'

'What?'

She pulled the duvet to her chest and heard him let out a deep, angry sigh as he rolled over. The penny dropped with a disharmonious clang: engine stalled.

Would she ever catch a break?

Hang on though: engine stalled, him?

No, no surely it must be her, he couldn't even look at her right now. She extended a timid hand to his hair:

'I'm sorry Will, is there anything...'

'I can't believe this!' he hissed, pushing her hand away. She was busy slipping back into the ugly duckling's skin when he added: 'Jesus, I've done this in my head so many fucking...'

Elisabeth put a hand on his lips before they uttered more pointless profanities, and this time he let her.

'It's OK, Will, it's fine.'

He took her hand, kissed it, then moved it to his chest and rested it there, covered with his own, as he let out another sigh.

'No it isn't OK. This wasn't the plan.'

'Sorry,' she laughed – hysterical relief, she supposed – 'Sorry, Will, but has anything so far tonight been part of a plan? 'cos frankly that would be one hell of a fucked-up plan, excuse my French.'

He stroked her hand but said nothing.

'You know, I'd say we've done alright so far, actually. Considering. I mean I was certainly having fun.'

Though still too wounded to smile Will let his dark eyes soften again, and tucked his free hand under his head with another sigh. With the duvet running down and across to his hips he looked more beautiful than ever, perhaps because he did not seem to care whether he did or not. In the dim oblique light of her bedside lamp he was just in a different league, all perfect skin over muscles just taunt enough. A lovely symmetrical pattern in bas-relief, casting shadows in the grooves between each muscle, and absolutely begging her to run her fingers around them. And she made him nervous? Ha! Perhaps there were times in life after all, when it wasn't easier for the blokes.

Thinking about it though, it made sense for an ultra competitive trader to suffer a little performance anxiety. Right now poor Will was probably far too worried about out-shagging Tom to let himself have any fun with her, which whilst being a shame was also understandable. After all Tom was only two doors away and in all likelihood cursing both of them to hell eternal.

If only she could show Will how well he was doing, just to have her here stone cold sober and so stupidly happy. She briefly considered making him laugh at her pathetic, weed-induced and puke-inducing last sexual experience, but decided that bringing up Tom, however ironically, was likely to do more harm than good. No, now was the time to shut up, to shut up and enjoy what she had, i.e. a beautiful man inside and out, lying in her bed and far too worried about impressing her to get on with nailing her.

Besides, she thought with a private smile, if Will was going to apply the same degree of professionalism in her bed as he did back in the office, then she needn't worry: it would all be worth the wait.

'Will, according to you we've got twenty years to get this right,' she said, getting up to grab a t-shirt. 'So for now why don't you just hug me so we can get some sleep? You're a great hugger, you know,' she added, sidling back up to him and pulling the duvet back over them. Something to do with his size, the texture of his skin and its smell, but it was bliss to be in his arms.

'Get used to it,' he said.

Oh yes, that was the other thing about his hugs: he could kiss the top of her head at the same time. She kissed the base of his beautiful neck good night and turned over. He was spooning her now, only his lips wouldn't keep still, instead of going to sleep they kept burrowing into her neck and ever closer to her ear, then one of his hands snuck under her t-shirt, travelled up away from her waist and past her ribs and then just as she started to bite her lips and take increasingly short breaths he took it back down and held her waist to his while his other hand travelled down, and sent her to sleep a very satisfied woman indeed.

The next morning she woke up with his chin now stubbly against her shoulder, and his hand resting back chastely on her ribs. She put her own, much colder hand over it and marvelled again at the wonderful smoothness of his skin. He stirred, rubbed his face on the back of her neck, and kissed it. At this she turned round, grabbed his sleepy head between her hands and pecked his nose, then his mouth, then announced she was going for a shower. He held her back for a bit, kissing her. She thought this might lead to something more but no, he let her go.

Instead he waited until she came back all pink cheeked and dripping wet from the bathroom, and whipped her towel off.

The rest, thankfully, he took his time over and she was right: it had been worth the wait.

'Hey, sis.' said Vincent a few hours later, kissing her on both cheeks.

She'd just left Will at the Archway tube with a very happy grin lighting up his morning stubble, and just thinking about him now she was smiling all over again.

'Hey! How's Jane?' she asked after a heroic struggle to bring her mind back to her present company.

'She's OK, actually, she's even come downstairs today in your honour,' he said, leading her to the playroom.

'Well done, Dan, now you let your sister put a piece down,' Jane was saying, splayed over the sofa with her back to the door, to her twins working out a Winnie the Pooh jigsaw puzzle. Dan put another piece down anyway, so Sophie looked from him to her mummy with pleading eyes.

'Good clear leadership, Jane, great feedback, but he needs to work on his listening skills and Sophie here needs to verbalise rather than emote,' she said, walking in, 'I'm just catching Jane up on Talent Management since she missed such an excellent off-site,' she explained to Vincent.

'Elisabeth!' Jane cried, and almost stood up.

'Stay there, stay right where you are, hang on!' Elisabeth said, rushing to her side for a clumsy hug over the bump. 'How are you?'

'Elisabeth! Elisabeth, what have you done!'

'What?' she smiled, and bit her lips.

'Oh, Elisabeth! Look at her, darling, look! She's had ss….' Jane's eyes were flashing away with excitement when they fell on her children, 'S- E- X!' she stage whispered at Vincent over her shoulder, 'She has! You have, you know you have!'

'What's Essie Ex, Mummy?' Sophie asked while her brother stared jealously at the puzzle piece which she'd just dropped back down onto the carpet, but which he knew he wasn't allowed to pick up.

'Essie Ex?'

'It's French for…' Vincent started.

'…cough medicine!' Elisabeth finished, and faked a couple of little coughs. 'Just had it, feel a lot better already!'

'Bet you do, Sis, I bet you do,' said Vincent, grinning.

'Mummy, can I have some Essie Ex? I've got a cough, kuf kuf,' went Dan, and managed to outdo his sister's famed doe eyes.

'No, you don't,' said Jane firmly.

'It's Essie Yuck,' said Elisabeth, 'As in yuck yuck, because it tastes of coffee and wine and … and spinach, and it's only for grownups.'

'Funny, I would have said it tasted of prawns,' Vincent mused, and Elisabeth started to chuckle and had to put a hand in front of her mouth and pretend to cough again, while Jane tried to shoot her husband a threatening look instead of starting to giggle as well.

'But I like prawns, Mummy!' Dan pleaded.

'No, you don't,' said Jane, and tried her best to frown at the two grownup Bennets.

'Daddy, will you give me some Essie Yuk medicine before bed?' Dan tried again, with all the determination of his three years of age.

'Let's go to the kitchen,' said Jane, and started slowly getting up on one elbow. Elisabeth took her hand and hoisted her up, all the while wondering why on earth her brother wasn't doing this.

'Go on, then, out with it! How was it?' said Jane as soon as she was sat down again, catching her breath with her hands under her bump.

'Are you sure I should listen to this?' asked Vincent, wincing. 'Not sure I like the talk of prawns.'

'Up to you, dear,' said Jane, 'but I'm not missing this for the world.'

'Put the kettle on, bro.'

'Who with?' he asked, duly complying.

'With Will of course!' Jane cried.

'Really?' he frowned, 'Elisabeth, are you mad? I thought you hated the guy?'

'I…'

'You've missed a whole load of episodes, darling,' Jane said with an impatient wave, 'Go and … check the football scores or something, I'll catch you up later.'

'With pleasure,' he shrugged, and took off.

'Oh look at you!' said Jane again, to Elisabeth's beaming face. 'So you had a good time? How was the do?'

'Uh, it was strange. Amusing, in places. We kept bumping into all these acquaintances of his, who all seemed to jump to the wrong conclusion.'

'Well, in hindsight you can hardly blame them.'

'Yes, in hindsight. Which is a marvellous thing, as every quant knows. But at the time it was pretty awkward.'

'Did he like the dress?'

'Will? I'm not sure about him but it helped me a lot, channelled my inner classy bird, I suppose. Turns out even I have one, who knew?'

'Will and I did, that's who. And how were TSF?'

'Awful. Actually that's not true, one of them could sing. Anyway so that too was a bit embarrassing oh and, we danced!'

'You danced? In new shoes? Are you mad, did you step on his toes?'

'I didn't. You know, thinking about it, that's just about the only thing that I would have expected to go wrong, but didn't.'

'Why, you didn't take him back to yours, did you?'

'Well…'

'Goodness, Elisabeth, what are you trying to do to the guy! You know you can't expect them to take your side, they're Tom's friends, you don't stand a chance, Will doesn't stand a chance!'

'It's OK, no, we survived. Just about.'

Jane raised one eyebrow.

'Kudos to Will, believe me. Though to be fair to him, Mac was impeccably British about it this morning. Made him a cuppa and talked about the markets and the weather and even pretended to enjoy it: quite a pair of guys, these two.'

Jane frowned, and Elisabeth got up again to fill their mugs. As she stood up she heard a text arrive in the back pocket of her jeans and checked her phone: her name and a question mark. She started grinning all over again as she brought the mugs back to the table.

'Was that him?'

'He's so sweet, Jane!' she moaned.

'Sweet?'

'Oh but he is! You should see him, when he's happy, when he's... He's just delicious and… Jane, tell me, what the hell am I doing?'

'I don't know, Elisabeth. But whatever it is, you certainly look like you enjoyed it. I take it the Essie Ex was good?'

Elisabeth pinched her lips, raised her eyebrows and gave a vigorous nod.

'And he's as besotted as you are?'

'Am I besotted? Already?'

Jane pinched her lips as Elisabeth just had, raised her eyebrows as Elisabeth just had, and then nodded, only more slowly and knowingly than Elisabeth just had.

'You know what, Jane, I actually think he might be even more besotted than I am - believe it or not. And has been for a lot longer. It does spook me a little when he waxes lyrical sometimes, but then I feel all gushy myself… Look, I've no idea what's going on, really, but we're rushing headlong.'

'Don't worry, Elisabeth, it wouldn't be like you not to rush headlong.'

'Really?'

'Of course, really! Just look at me: how many more times are you going to fall in love before you get to this stage?' Jane said with a pat on her bump, 'This may well be the last time, you know, so you may as well go ahead and make the most of it.'

Jane looked on at Elisabeth with her large, infinitely patient eyes, and Elisabeth suddenly realised that the sight of her was far scarier than anything Will had come up with so far. This was not twenty years hence; it wasn't even ten, for god's sake.

'You could go and see him now, if you like,' Jane said, rubbing her belly, 'You don't have to stay for lunch here if you don't want to.'

'I'll stay for lunch and then maybe afterwards…'

'Why don't you go out to the garden and call him back?'

Elisabeth did not, in the end, stay for lunch.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> copyright 2021 Mel Liffragh, all rights reserved.


	28. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> That's it, last chapter. If you've enjoyed this story, tell your friends to tell their friends to read it while it's free - I will be looking for an agent! And while I work on my next piece (a modern day Emma, but with bees) you can find me (and my bees) on Tumblr as mellifragh  
> All the best, stay safe and thanks again for reading.  
> Mel

With typical Bennet contrariness, Victoria Marie Elisabeth Bennet-Bingley decided to grace the world with her appearance one week late, on the sixteenth of May. She was a picture of health, unlike her exhausted mother. Almost a month later, on the 15th of June, Neil put his first European trade through tradePad. That night once again the drinks were on Raj down at the Porter's by Borough Market.

'... and my boyfriend's got anozer job in London zis weekend!' Paul exulted.

'How did he get started in the flower business?' Master Yoda asked him.

How things had changed since the Spring. For a start, Jane had come to her senses and decided to go back to work, signing up to a 10% pay cut. She'd get the exact same crazy amount of work done over four days instead of five but, being Jane, she had managed to negotiate herself out of the more traditional full 20% pay cut by pointing out that she would surely end up doing considerably more than just checking her emails on her day off. This was a first for the bank, a daring and dangerous precedent the firm was keen to keep very quiet. It made Elisabeth prouder than she could say: perhaps there was hope for the sisterhood after all.

The mood had also changed on the desk, where things were starting to feel almost settled. With everyone on tradePad it wasn't as loud as it had been when all deals were made through the phones. Paul's boyfriend, Frank, had come out with them couple of times, and he and Yoda had bonded over greyhounds to such an extent that they were talking of buying a racing dog together. Meanwhile Neil and Natasha were, more conventionally, talking of buying a flat together. And Elisabeth had started to wear skirts to the office, occasionally. Two A-line skirts, to be precise, and only ever with flat shoes. Today the navy one was on, in honour of Raj's visit.

Paul started regaling Andy, Newbie and Yoda with tales of Catherine Deneuve's horticultural taste, and Neil turned to Elisabeth:

'How's things going with Chris then?'

He and Natasha were holding hands as he asked this, and she eyed them jealously.

'I'm not even sure,' she said, 'what little I see of him these days.'

'Come on, it can't be that bad,' Will said, and she shot him a murderous glance:

'It is. He's been out with work every single night this week.'

'I'm glad you've found someone who shares your dedication to strong work ethics,' Raj commented without an ounce of irony.

'That is true,' Will concurred, though in his case with a raised eyebrow and a smile in his eye, 'and in fairness you've been working pretty late this week too, Elisabeth.'

'What does he do?' Raj asked.

'He's a lawyer, Raj, what do you expect?' Will said with another teasing look at her.

'No wonder, indeed,' Natasha said.

Elisabeth sighed as she looked at her and Neil, standing all cosy and happy, shoulder to shoulder.

'Where is he tonight?'

'Out with work - naturally.'

'And so are you,' Will pointed out.

'That works out well, then,' Raj nodded.

She'd never wanted to strangle him more.

'Come on,' Neil said, 'when do we get to meet him? Are you hiding him from us, or are you just hiding us from him?'

'I'd say the latter, definitely,' said Will.

'You know what? At this rate soon there may be nothing to hide. Sometimes I'm not sure why I even bother with him,' she replied with daggers in her eyes.

'Right, clearly we need more drinks here,' Will said, raising his empty glass as evidence. 'Elisabeth, come and help me translate the wine list, will you?'

'Sure.'

She followed him to the far end of the bar, then around it until they were out of sight from the rest of their group. There he stopped, turned around and grabbed hold of the sides of her head:

'OK don't dump him. Please? He loves you, he's really sorry, abjectly sorry, Raj will be off tomorrow and then he'll make it up to you, promise!'

She begun to smile, and he jumped at the chance to kiss her. They hadn't done that for a whole three days so they indulged for a delicious long while.

'So you're not gonna dump him?'

'Of course not.'

'I've missed you too, you know,' he said, and this time she was the one who reached for his lips, until instinct made her pull back. Raj was rounding the corner of the bar, headed for the gents. She grabbed a wine list from the counter and started pointing at it randomly.

'We're having Sancerre by the way. They're far too pissed to appreciate anything better.'

'Sure. That was close,' she said, pointing at the gents' door. 'I suppose we've got no chance of bumping off early?'

'Not on his last night in town, no.'

'It's not fair, I hate this! I can't even argue with you properly!'

'Hey look, I hate it too... oops, there he is, look busy.'

She hid behind the wine list again, while Will waved at their boss. She knew he was out of sight when Will pulled the wine list away, dumped it on the bar and took her in his arms. She pressed herself against him, their arms wrapped tight around each other, her hands stroking his back. Sitting next to him for the last three days without getting to do this even once had been torture. With her ear to his chest she felt his heart start to accelerate. Four months in she still loved doing that to him, loved it best of all the fun things they did to each other when Raj and the guys weren't around. She looked up at him and found his lips on hers again.

'Off you go then,' he said, not very convincingly in view of the fact that he was still holding on to her waist. She tucked her hair back and tried to gather her wits:

'OK, and we're having the Sancerre 'cos we're too pissed for anything better, right?'

'That's the one. Go on,' he smiled, tucked the other side of her hair back, and sent her off with another kiss.

'I thought we'd have the Sancerre,' she said to Neil a moment later, 'I reckoned we're all far too pissed to appreciate anything nicer.'

Translating wine lists had long replaced pool as Elisabeth's favourite activity on their work nights out. Thankfully Will always sent her back with her opening line at the ready, else light-headed with the taste of forbidden fruit she would have given the whole game away. This was why they'd had to make Chris up: on the Monday after the Rheinland do she'd looked so obscenely happy that within seconds of her sitting down the guys knew she was in love, and wanted to know who with.

She'd given them the first name to spring to her mind, the name of the person in the 60 second interview of that day's _Metro_. So now they were stuck with the name Chris which, as it happened, neither of them liked, but they did so much pretending on an average day that not infrequently she'd called Will Chris in the privacy of his flat too.

She felt a buzz in her handbag – a nice understated French one Will had bought her to wear with her pocket-less skirts. His sartorial taste was far better than hers, undoubtedly, and to Jane's eternal gratitude Elisabeth didn't seem to mind him civilising her – up to a point. The look of pride in his eyes when she wore something a teensy bit feminine more than made up for the effort of having to open a handbag rather than reach into a back pocket to retrieve her texts.

Chris was writing that she looked gorgeous and please would she hang in there and come back to his afterwards if he promised to make it worth her while? She sighed and smiled and thought for all of about two seconds before sending a positive reply. Will switched to water after that, and despite the late hour he did indeed make it very much worth her while once they eventually got back to his.

* * *

Copyright Mel Liffragh 2021, all rights reserved


	29. In Hindsight

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _I started writing this story ages back, and it's been through umpteen chops, changes and edits before I finally had the guts to share it with you as the 28 chapters you have read (for which, thank you).  
>  As I revisited it for what might well be the last time over the last few months, it felt like I needed to bid my own farewell to Will and Elisabeth. I began writing out their first date together as a way to go over their story one more time, checking for consistency and getting a little more of Will's perspective.  
> So it you too feel like you've not quite had enough of Elisabeth and Will yet, here's that first dinner date in full. There's one more tiny reveal but after that it might be time to let them go - unless you want to start again from Chapter 1 ;-)  
> I'll be looking for an agent to represent me and I expect that readership stats can only help in that process, so tell your friends to tell their friends to read it while it's here and it's free. Meanwhile I'm working on another modern AU homage to JA - Emma this time - so watch out for _A Bee In Her Bonnet _, starting in the next few weeks. I'm also on Tumblr under MelLiffragh if you want to check out my bees or find out what it's like on this side of the writing desk.  
>  I've had a few suggestions through comments about potential one-shots. Keep them coming and I might just have a go. But for now good bye and thanks again for reading.  
>  _Mel_  
> _

* * *

'It's a really nice place,' Elisabeth said, looking around. The waiter had found them a cosy table. Down in a lovely low-lit basement, with just a few other diners at the opposite end of the room, they were nicely out of the way, free to gaze upon each other in peace. All the staff were French and, but for everything being twice as expensive as it would have been there, she could have been in one of those "cave" places in Paris, where some smoky old pianist lulls you into talking and sipping wine until dawn.

Actually there was a pianist, upstairs, but she didn't need lulling.

'Glad you like it,' Will said, reaching for her hand.

'It's lucky we found it.'

'Luck had nothing to do with it: I've spent the last week memorising the Hardens in case you wanted to go Italian or Thai or Japanese.'

'Ah…'

'Did I just freak you out again? Little bit?'

Of course he had, a little bit, but:

'No, not at all, it's… that's a very nice thing for you to have done.'

'Yeah, I wish you didn't still find it surprising when I'm nice.'

'I don't find it surprising when you're nice anymore! But memorising the Hardens is above and beyond.'

Gosh, wasn't she doing well at keeping it together? His hand on hers helped. Loads. His mouth on hers would have helped even more, but this was a date. Date, date date date date.

Date.

_What on earth do people do on dates?_

Will smiled and squeezed her hand. It appeared she had said it out loud.

She freaked out a tiny bit again and explained:

'I mean I know you pretty well and you know me better than I do myself, half the time.'

And I'm already dying to kiss you some more _,_ she added with her eyes. He replied to the same effect with his, then with his perfect, delicious mouth he said:

'Maybe we clear up a few… misunderstandings.'

'Is that a Raj-ism?'

'I think he might have called it that in the past, yes. Anyway, this is where I apologise for being such an arse.'

'Oh now that's interesting: go ahead.'

'I'm sorry I was horrible with you.'

'OK. But why?'

'I'm sorry because I love you, obviously.'

Tiny freak out again. In the very best possible way.

'Why were you horrible to me in the first place? I'll freely admit I wasn't exactly super friendly with you to start with either. I'd never… anticipated liking you, but I didn't think I'd done anything to warrant full on hatred.'

'Had too.'

'What?'

'You hung my coat.'

'What? No, Will, that was a reason for me to hate you.'

'Problem is you've never watched yourself hang my coat.'

'Well obviously not but…'

'Did you drop those hangers on purpose?'

She had to laugh:

'What? Definitely not, no. You've noticed by now that I'm clumsy, right?'

'Only when you're flustered.'

'I was.'

'Why?'

''cos you were pretty hot yourself, Will! And bald as a coot, and thankfully not actually wearing my morning coffee, but you still weren't looking half grumpy about it. Anyway, did you really think I was deliberately dropping hangers so you'd check me out?'

'In so far as I was capable of coherent thought, yes, I thought you were a total tease. And a bloody good one too.'

'Wow. Interesting.'

'And for the record: I knew you probably weren't the receptionist. But I thought whoever you were you'd still be the better placed to deal with my coat and interview schedule than I was. Coffee spillage notwithstanding.'

'I know - but you could still have asked nicely.'

'True, but then you've never watched yourself splash coffee all over yourself, and then pat it dry. I swear I had you down as a total French tease.'

'I guess that would come from a lifetime of teasing females vying for your attention, Will.'

He shook his head as if he didn't know what she was talking about.

'And anyway: nice try, but are you sure you weren't just being grumpy?'

He took a moment.

'Grumpy would be another Raj-ism: I was irate. You've figured out by now that I like to stay focused when I'm about to do something important, like spend the day interviewing for my next job?'

'It was a formality, Will, Raj had such a massive bloody crush on you...'

'Well Toad and Sir Phillip didn't and anyway, here I was, 7:30, in the zone, ready, focused. Someone bumps into me and barely acknowledges me.'

'Hey, I apologised!'

'Yes, after you'd made sure your paper was OK. And then I swear you stand there, you had coffee on your boob, for god's sake.'

'Did not!'

'It was right there,' Will said, pointing at his chest.

'No way, Will, nuh-uh, it was on my neck and anyway, my shirts don't open that low.'

'They do when you're leaning over the reception counter mopping up your bloody paper, Elisabeth. Trust me on this. So yes, that rather ruined my interview Mojo. By the time you'd finally mopped up your precious equations and _then_ patted yourself dry, half of me wanted to back you against that wardrobe door and stop that French mouth of yours,'

'Wow...'

And also, yes please.

'Meanwhile the other half wanted to break your glasses and make you notice something other than my cue-balled head.'

'And bad attitude. I noticed your good looks first, then your cue ball and _then_ the bad attitude.'

'Well, my point exactly. And then cherry on top, you turn out to be Raj's pet quant, a woman I'd pictured with halitosis and a personality bypass...'

'See, why do people make those assumptions about us quants?'

'Empirical observation: have you met your old team?'

'Sample size of what, five?'

'Whatever, I was pissed off with you, Elisabeth. You had no right to do those things to me and then barely give me the time of day.'

'Hey, you barely gave me the time of day first.'

'I know, I'm sorry. If it's any consolation I hated myself for it at the time. But I swear the more Raj told me to play nice with you the more it made me want to break your glasses. Dean told me to play nice too, I almost wanted to break _his_ glasses.'

'Poor Dean, he's such a nice guy. I'm glad he made you see sense.'

'He didn't, Toad did.'

'What?'

'Yep, old Toad. Thought he was going to have you in tears in that meeting,'

'I wasn't... OK yes, it was pretty close, actually.'

Will smiled:

'Which made me realise that, one, I was insanely possessive about the pet quant and no one else got to have a go at her because she was _my_ pet quant. And two, being nice to my pet quant gave me even more of a kick than being nasty to her. In short Dean was right, as usual.'

'Good old Dean, I'm afraid I wasn't very nice to him when I first met him. He took it so well...'

'He was under strict instructions to make a good impression.'

'Does he ever not? Seriously, how is that guy still single?'

Will's face darkened, fleetingly but noticeably.

'What?'

'Nothing.'

'What? Oh come on, Will…'

'You're going to make fun of me again.'

'And that would be the end of the world because…?'

'Fair cop. OK, well if you must know there was a time last February when I got seriously worried you were going to ask me for Dean's number.'

'Really? Was there?'

'Were you?'

'I did think about it, yes, a couple of times…'

His face darkened again, and he looked almost as mad as he had, briefly, outside the club. Now that she understood how that worked, it was almost fun.

Almost.

Well, only because she knew she'd get to make it go away again by saying:

'I considered asking for his number so I could get him to apologise for me, over that character assassination I dealt you on my way out of the office, you know, the week we went live?'

There, gone again. Like magic:

'I've created a monster,' he said. 'Can't believe you're bluffing me now.'

'I'm not… well I am, but only because I'm trying to apologise. I don't often take advice graciously, Will, I realise that, and I appreciate you sticking your neck out, you know, making the effort to tell me when my butt needs a kick.'

'And I appreciate you making the effort to kick mine when I'm a grumpy bastard. Thank you.'

'You're welcome.'

'Apologies over?'

'Oh no, I don't think so.'

'Really? I mean…'

She laughed.

'Looking at a twenty-year horizon, Will, and speaking as a quant it's statistically certain that we'll have more bust ups.'

'OK fair enough but for now?'

''course.'

'What are you going to eat?'

'Hmm, I really don't care provided I eat it with you. We'll just point at something on the menu whenever the waiter shows up and I'm sure it'll be delicious. Do they have a wine you're going to like?'

'I really don't care either provided I drink it with you.'

'What, don't you want to have a fine vintage to remember twenty years hence?'

He smiled:

'Quirky red from Burgundy, then, like you?'

Her heart melted a little bit and she nodded:

'It's so unfair that I can't kiss you right now, Will.'

'Life's a bitch,' he smiled, changing the intertwine on their fingers.

The French waiter, with the genetically engineered nostrils of a prize truffle pig, smelt a pause in the conversation and wafted by. They'd still not so much as glanced at the menus, but Elisabeth smiled at him and fluently asked him for _le canard_ , then Will said he'd have the same before ordering wine. There was a brief debate over the pairing merits of the 1995 premier cru vs. the 1992 Cotes de Nuits, then the waiter disappeared and Will said:

'How did that work? Have you been here before, or can you also read menus in upside down French through the cover?'

Elisabeth was about to give him a sensible answer when she was seized by another attack of the heebie-jeebies, this time over the idea of having to live up to either of the fine bottles just discussed. Out came the comedy French:

'Oh, Duck, they always have _canard_ and it's always _delicieux!_ '

'OK, if you're doing that French thing to turn me on it's working.'

'Crap: so it turns you on when I freak out?'

That explained ever such a lot.

In hindsight.

' _Are_ you freaking out? Still?' he said, re-establishing his dominion on her hand.

'Not anymore, no, I think I'm fine now, sorry.'

'Don't be, I kind of like it that I can get you to freak out.'

'I know, I get that.'

She liked it that she could get him to freak out too, and now that they'd each had their apologies, and their freak outs, maybe it was time they tried having a normal date.

'So tell me about your family, Will, do you have any siblings?'

'I have a younger sister, Georgie, she's lovely.'

Crap.

'Does she live in London?'

'She does – well, she travels a lot.'

Oh crap crap crap.

'Why, what does she do?'

'Concert pianist.'

Oh for crying out loud! Not another effing Croft-winning puppy!

'You OK, Elisabeth?'

'Fine, fine, so… uh… when she's in London she doesn't live with you, does she?'

'What? No! Who does that?'

'Never mind.'

'Look, Georgie's gonna love you, OK? Don't worry about it for a second. She already loves you, says you've improved me.'

'Isn't that a bit of a backhanded compliment?'

'It's a statement of fact. You have improved me.'

'You've improved me too, Will.'

'Well, then let's carry on improving each other and she's going to love you even more.'

She smiled.

Two plates of duck arrived, expertly timed by the no-doubt French kitchen staff to coincide perfectly with this brief, self-satisfied pause in their conversation. On his way back the waiter adjusted Will's jacket on the back of his chair and Elisabeth said:

'Is that the one from the Christmas party?'

He nodded.

'You were really, but really nice then too, I'm not sure I ever got to thank you properly for that, I was so… out of body. I can't even remember anything properly about that evening. All I know is there was water, a cigar, and your jacket smelt really nice.'

'Funny, I thought it smelt nicer after you handed it back.'

'I'm sorry, it must have reeked of smoke. I should have offered to have it dry cleaned, I didn't think…'

'Don't worry, I didn't want it dry cleaned. I mean I did take it, eventually, but I wished I could have hung on to that bit of you.'

He smiled, she smiled back. No one freaked out.

'What happened, what did we do?'

'You, not an awful lot: if you don't count you smoking your cigar in that hot French tease manner of yours.'

'I don't.'

'I know, but you haven't watched yourself doing that either. Anyway, meanwhile, I pounced on the opportunity of having you to myself outside and pretending that you wanted to be spending time with me. It was nice, actually, while it lasted. I got to stare at you a lot and you didn't stop me. When you spoke you made it sound as if we could be friends. I didn't want to be friends, of course, but that was the best I could play for at that point and I knew even that wouldn't last. It made it even more precious, you know, that sweet feeling of not being completely unwanted.'

'Sorry, is that how I made you feel?'

'Only every time you spoke to me, no biggie.'

'Aw…'

'Hey, look, we'd had a bad start, I knew that. I knew I had a lot of back-pedalling to do before I could get anywhere near your good books, and it was nice that clearly that night there was someone or something that had pissed you off more than I still did. So I say we raise a glass to Toad, shall we?'

They did, and the wine was delicious, well worth remembering twenty years hence.

'You know, Will, by then you already hadn't pissed me off in quite a while. Not since I'd met Dean, basically. No one could be an asshole and have him for a bestie.'

'True, let's raise a glass to a top wingman too.'

They did.

'But seriously, how is he still single?'

'Oh, daddy issues. He's a complete tosser – his Dad, obviously. Dean's a good guy with a thing for bad girls.'

'Well, that certainly explains Lily.'

He nodded, and they tried the _canard_ and joked that it was _delicieux_. Though in truth Elisabeth did not feel remotely hungry she dutifully set about eating it because that, too, would be worth remembering, in twenty years' time.

'So I know Jane Bingley and she's great. What about your brother, what's he like?' Will asked, and took another mouthful.

'I …'

'What?'

She set her cutlery down:

'I've never thought of this before but… Will, do you like cricket?'

''course, yes, who doesn't?'

'Well, me, for a start, though… I mean cricket's fine, obviously, up to a point. Would you say for instance that you'd enjoy watching cricket over and above taking your kids to the park?'

'I'm sensing the correct answer to this question is no.'

'OK but what's your answer?'

'No, 'course not.'

'Oh good. Maybe you're not completely like him then.'

'Like who, your brother?'

She picked her knife and fork up, then set them down again. The canard may be _delicieux_ but this was – well, this was another of the evening's revelations:

'Will, do you have any idea what it's like to grow up with a brother who's six years older than you, who will always be taller than you, more effortlessly handsome, _way_ better at sports, infinitely more popular at school, who swans from the top football team in high school and into the top business school, and then straight into investment banking, not forgetting to pass "produce gorgeous offspring" via "marry sister's best friend"? A guy who's already done everything you're about to do, only better? That's my brother for you, Will: now does he remind you of anyone, by any chance?'

'No, who?'

'Jesus, Will! This is why I had it in for you! From the start, I'm so sorry! I love Vincent, very much, he's a top guy. But I've spent my entire life fighting him for attention, living on my wits, desperately trying to beat him at just the one thing, once, even though it's hopeless, and I'm afraid the moment Raj gave me your CV, I mean even if you hadn't been drop dead gorgeous in a Yul Brynner kind of a way, I'd still have resented you. I'd still have had to make you pay for making me hang your coat.'

'By dropping hangers?'

'That's right, and smoking cigars. I still can't believe you thought that.'

'Elisabeth, I've no idea just how good looking that brother of yours might be, but I do know that any hot-blooded man would be yours at the drop of a hanger.'

'Thanks I'll remember that.'

'Besides, I'm sure he envies you too.'

'I… really don't think so.'

'It's overrated, being the eldest, trust me. It's expected for us to do the right thing. It gets taken for granted. Georgie's eight years younger and I always felt she got to be so much more interesting.'

'In what way?'

'I come from a long boring line of bankers, Elisabeth. Georgie's the only one with talent, with her magic fingers and big blue eyes and fine blonde curls. Did they make your brother sit through your concerts when you were a kid and all dressed up in frills? I swear there's nothing scarier than a cute six-year-old in frills racing through Mozart.'

'I think your sister's concerts were probably far better than mine. And anyway how did you know I…'

'You blabbed to Dean.'

'Of course. Top wingman Dean. Dean Fitzwilliam, right? Did you two bond over your unusual names in college?'

'We did, actually. First week of term, he tracked me down to return some misdirected mail. Very considerate guy, even then.'

'And he never…?'

'What?'

'Well, seeing as your sister's by all accounts very nice, and he's very nice too, and on the logic that Jane was my friend before she was Vincent's wife, did they never…'

'Hmm, no. Georgie's not into guys.'

'Oh. Does she have a girlfriend then?'

'No, that's… not a happy subject at the moment.'

'Why, what happened?'

'She did meet a girl she really liked. About a year ago, at some party, a painter, and sculptor I think. It was pretty obvious she wasn't relationship material but Georgie was swept off her feet. We knew it wasn't serious but we all thought it was sweet at first. It'd taken Georgie such a long time to come out, she'd worked so hard her whole life, practising and performing. That woman, Sara, she was a taste of freedom. Took Georgie out to gigs instead concerts...'

'Sara?'

'I know, poncey or what? She couldn't just be a Sarah like everyone else... Anyway, Sara moved to Oxford last summer while Georgie was on tour. She was making stuff for a new gallery or something. So Georgie makes a surprise return trip, all the way from Vienna, to go and see her mid tour, and she finds her in bed with some guy.'

'Oh dear, I wish I'd known… well I guess I did… sorry, ignore me, I'm not making any sense. Poor Georgie though, I know exactly how that feels.'

'Seriously: what is it with you girls and cheating morons? Can't you tell them a mile off? Because I can tell you, Sara definitely did not have a shred of a stable relationship vibe about her.'

'I know, nor did Tom, really, he never made a mystery of it. I can't speak for Georgie of course but with me I think... well you wouldn't know about that of course, but when you're not 100% sure about some of the life choices you've just made it's awfully easy to fall for the guy who tells you everything you want to hear. Or girl.'

Will nodded. He had his mouth full and his 'OK let me think about this' face on.

'Whereas conversely, with the guy who tells you what you _need_ to hear – and thank you, again, Will, for doing that - with that guy it can be a little difficult to believe that he might actually like you.'

'Hey, things would have been a lot easier if I'd just liked you.'

'Aw.'

'Same with kissing you on your doorstep by the way. The plan was to keep it light, you know, classy, leave you wanting more. Guess I messed that up too, spooked you right up...'

'Oh no no, you did leave me wanting more, Will, that was the truly scary part. That and you playing it cool in 3.11 on the Tuesday. Jesus that was mean, you definitely had me bluffed.'

'You giving me the cold shoulder all Monday had me bluffed too, believe it or not.'

'Sorry, well, like you said, I guess things would have been simpler if I'd just liked you.'

Will stopped eating and grabbed both her hands, beaming his beautiful, his gorgeous true smile.

'A toast to Rheinland, then, for giving us another chance?'

'Sure.'

They clinked and took another sip. The wine, having breathed, was getting even better.

'This is amazing, Will, thank you,' she said as she set her glass back down, 'and it's been a great date, but I make it less than 36 hours before I have to share you with everyone at the office again so would you mind awfully if we…?'

He didn't.


End file.
